


Great Things By Impulse

by jane_potter



Series: The Riotverse [7]
Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-10-01
Updated: 2011-01-10
Packaged: 2017-10-12 08:25:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 33,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/122894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jane_potter/pseuds/jane_potter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emotional control is not a matter to be taken lightly. If lost, it can ruin a Vulcan-- drive him mad. But as Spock makes his place on the Enterprise and the Enterprise carves her place out in the brutality of their universe, the lure of emotion proves to be nearly as powerful as his attraction to Kirk. One way or another, chances seem incalculably high that he will die the early death of a pirate. [ABANDONED (sorry!)]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is dedicated to Renee, also known as easilymused1956, who passed away recently. She followed the Riotverse almost from its very beginning and always made sure to leave a kind comment, the last of which stated that she was looking forward to the next part of the story-- this part. To her family and closer friends, _tushah nash-veh k'dular_.

As he had the last fifteen days, Spock woke in pain.

His first voluntary action of waking was to slow his breathing. In his sleep, it had increased 18.8% above his normal rate of conscious respiration, let alone unconscious respiration, which should have been a mere nine breaths per minute. His heart rate had increased by a corresponding 16.4%, and it was this which caused the sharp pains lancing through his body.

Very slowly, Spock rolled onto his back. His conclusion was that some time in the night, the pain had caused his body to instinctively turn onto its side and curl around the source of the pain, to shield the injured part from further damage. The probability of said further damage occurring was only .00012%, as the _Enterprise_ 's life support systems were calibrated quite thoroughly to prevent erratic pockets of drastically increased artificial gravity from forming for anything short of the multidirectional tachyon vector singularity formed by a cold matter-antimatter ignition. In the case of that .00012% eventuality, curling into a fetal position would do nothing to reduce the strain on the blood vessels in his heart. Nonetheless, it was the fifteenth time Spock had been unable to prevent the unconscious movement from occurring.

As he began to control his respiration and lower his heart rate to more manageable levels, Spock took stock of the rest of himself. His skin was flushed, subcutaneous capillaries dilated so that the comfortable, arid heat of his private cabin felt cool against his exposed flesh. His mouth was dry, indicating that he had been panting in his sleep again. Furthermore, and most tellingly, Spock could feel the head of his partially erect penis resting against his inner thigh, halfway out of the sheath and slick with lubricant. His body still hummed with the half remembered echoes of unconscious pleasure.

 _W'l'qni_ did not dream. Nor, for that matter, did half _w'l'qni_. Not in the manner that humans dreamed, in any case. However, given a suitably disorganised state of mind, the highly trained and extremely sensitive _w'l'qn_ brain would continue to circulate material that had not been properly internalised and dealt with. If said material happened to be memories of an intense sexual encounter and unsettling thoughts about the appeal of forcing one's commanding officer to his knees...

Intellectually speaking, Spock understood that not all fantasies had a literal basis in reality. The appeal of rape fantasies to humans, for instance, was the surrender of control and lack of responsibility for whatever happened, however pleasurable it was in the fantasy. For _w'l'qni_ the matter was somewhat different, as even rape, in fantasy or reality, did not excuse a loss of control-- if anything, it was the exact opposite. It left Spock at a loss as to what to conclude about having a fantasy that was the antithesis of having control forcibly removed from his hands.

Given the historical precedent in his species for exactly that type of behavior, Spock was reluctant to examine it too closely. He told himself firmly that it was illogical to pursue resolution of a line of thought when the pursuit caused more emotional disturbance than the thought itself.

His bodily rhythms returned to a more normal state, Spock lifted himself from the light meditational trance he had descended into.

"Computer, time."

"It is-- it is-- it is--"

Spock cast a glance at the tiny speaker in the ceiling from which the computer's malfunctioning voice emerged. He noted that it was speaking in Standard rather than _w'l'qnir_. One of Uhura's additions to the language matrix had gone awry, then.

"Halt last command. Display time on com unit."

The screen on the bulkhead before his desk-ledge lit up. _Thirty-six eighty sub-Terran hours AM_.

Yes. An error in the programming.

After a moment, Spock's internal time-keeper informed him that it had been 219.154 Terran hours since he had calibrated the _Enterprise_ 's timekeeping program by the recorded time at the Ferengi outpost. Therefore it was currently 0309 hours and 14.4 seconds, and Spock was late for alpha shift.

 _Not_ , Spock thought, _that anybody respects the shift schedule_. His human crewmates generally worked whenever and for however long they wanted, and Kirk permitted it provided that the necessary tasks were being accomplished. But it was the duty of the executive officer to manage matters such as the schedule of working hours, and Spock did so despite the fact that it was essentially a useless exercise. He was performing the full extent of his duties without fault, and would continue to do so. He would not give Kirk a reason to find fault in his work.

Therefore, his failure to report for duty on time was doubly reprehensible. If Spock was not following his own schedule, then what reason did the crew have to?

Dressing was a simple matter. Spock had boarded the _Enterprise_ with only his wallet, personal communicator and the clothes on his back, and, having failed to disembark during their momentary stop at the Ferengi outpost, had not purchased any further belongings. Although leather pants were impractical for the majority of daily tasks, he had no alternative. Likewise, his jacket could not be foregone because the temperature of the _Enterprise_ , save for Spock's cabin, had been lowered to a frigid 21.5 degrees Celsius.

Spock was merely grateful that _w'l'qni_ did not possess sweat glands, or his clothing would have become noticeably odourous by the fifth day. His human co-workers had managed to delay the inevitable smell by switching clothes and using the sonic showers frequently, but the showers weren't calibrated to remove grime from fabrics and the _Enterprise_ 's laundry sonics had been one of the systems damaged during the cold start. As it was, Spock noticed an unpleasant white discolouration beginning to gather at the seams of his shirt: _w'l'nqi_ shed skin cells at a far greater rate and volume than did humans.

Spock mentally increased the priority of repairing the laundry facilities as he left his cabin, shuffling it slightly higher up the list of tasks he had to complete.

The hallway of the cabin deck was deserted, which Spock was thankful for. He did not relish the eventuality of having to explain his first tardiness to anybody. It was, somewhat unusually, also quiet. Everybody else was asleep or already on shift, then.

Spock didn't think his crewmates had yet realised that the cabin bulkheads were not soundproof.

In the stairwell, clanging noises drifted up from the engineering bay two decks down. Stopping on the second deck, Spock glanced out of the stairwell and found the medical lab clear. The door to the dispensary was open, however, and McCoy's angry muttering indicated his presence. Spock glided through sickbay as quickly as possible.

The lack of private hallways was not a fault in the ship's design; it was a logical use of restricted space. Spock found himself wishing, however, that the partition dividing sickbay and the science labs was on the other side of the stairwell door. Willing as Spock was to make some behavioural compromises for the sake of avoiding unnecessary conflict, he refused to duck behind the science side of the partition in order to cross the laboratory space-- or, more illogically yet, use the engineering catwalk one deck farther down.

About to walk into the galley, Spock paused momentarily at the sight of a pair of legs sticking out from an open bulkhead panel. Then he stepped neatly over them, murmuring politely, "Good morning, Mr. Scott."

"Morning, lad!" Scott replied without removing himself from the panel, his voice distorted by reflection off the metal around him.

Spock took in the mess Scott had made of the ship's tiny galley. Every available storage surface was covered in tools, bolts, screws, wires, circuit boards and mechanical parts, in addition a total of 37 nearly full cups of coffee. Of most concern, it looked as though Scott was performing alterations to the food synthesiser.

"Is the synthesiser operational?" Spock inquired.

"What? Oh, aye. Never mind the mess, she's good to go. Order a cuppa coffee for me, would ye?"

"Were the other 37 cups unacceptable?"

"Well... I suppose they were _coffee_ , but it dinnae taste right, and Kirk swears the recipe chip he gave me had the molecular structure of the best damn brew in the universe. I've been making adjustments ever since, see, and I'm almost certain it's the carbon chains that're responsible."

Spock placed an empty cup on the pad, punched in the order and passed the resulting beverage down to Scott. The man emerged from the panel for just long enough to take one sip, grimace and set the cup aside before diving back into the aperture.

"Maybe I kin..."

"May I order my own sustenance?"

"Go right ahead! Shouldn't be a bother. Tell me if anything tastes a bit... chalky."

Spock hesitated only a moment before lifting his tea to his lips and taking a sip. Then he went very still.

"Mr. Scott," he said, so coldly that Scott emerged hesitantly from the bulkhead, "you have evidently not managed to perfect Kirk's coffee. You have, however, succeeded in ruining the only palatable cup of tea on this ship."

"Oh," Scott said. "Er, I-- So would ye say that tastes more like a problem with the carbon chains or the nitrogenous arms?"

"I do not like to exercise my technical authority over your considerable experience, but in this case I am 'pulling rank', as it is said. You will return the synthesiser's programming to its original settings, and cease tampering with systems that are not damaged. I believe there are more crucial tasks that could use your attention-- the repair of the E19 air compressors, for instance. I recall that you estimated it would take you another twenty-two hours to complete that task."

Scott had the grace to look sheepish. "Aye, but I got the feelin' Gaila wanted me to clear out, see? Best not to argue with a woman. Especially not one with that many teeth and wrenches! She looked like she was having a grand old time dismantling the pumps all on her own. Bit of pent up rage in that one, if ye ask me."

"Reset the synthesiser and find an alternative task," Spock ordered, inwardly tense. The last thing he wanted was to alienate Scott by bringing to light the power Spock held over him. He would not, however, sacrifice his professional ethics by committing favouritism.

Scott, however, did not look the least bit put out. "Aye, sir," he said, and winked. "Congratulations on that promotion, by the way. Ought to celebrate that."

Reluctant to commit to it but unwilling to reject Scott, Spock said, "Perhaps at some future date." He stepped over another six cups of coffee and reached to open one of the cupboards, intending to take a meal substitute. His late awakening had thrown off his usual schedule and Spock was hungrier than usual.

"Hey, Scotty! Is it fixed yet?" Kirk's voice rang up the corridor from the bridge.

"'Fraid I'm gonna haveta set it aside for now, captain," Scott called back.

Spock closed his eyes in resigned anticipation. Sure enough, moments later Kirk yelled, "Oh, _fuck_ no," and there was the sound of footsteps running down the hall.

Already talking before he reached the galley, Kirk was in the middle of saying, "No, Scotty, you fix the goddamn synthesiser _first_ ," when he burst into the room and his gaze landed on Spock. Spock stiffened, and almost automatically he fell into a three-breath pattern, bolstering his mental shields as much as he could.

"Are these the commander's orders, Mr Scott?" Kirk asked quietly, not taking his eyes from Spock.

Scott pulled his head from the open panel, looking from Kirk to Spock and back several times before saying awkwardly, "...I'd really rather not take sides."

"The synthesiser is hardly a pressing issue at the moment," Spock said. He knew better than to argue the unimportance of taste in nutritionally complete foods with a human, particularly when he himself didn't entirely support that opinion. _If you want your extra-hot salsa_ , Robau's first officer had said, finally ending the argument, _then I get my caviar as salty as I like it_.

"Spock," Kirk said tightly. "I think you don't understand how _very much_ I want a goddamn cup of coffee."

Spock refused to cede the point. "There are thirty-eight here. Choose one."

"You're countermanding my orders, _Commander_."

"I am countermanding your whims. You are countermanding _my_ \--"

"Excuse me?" Kirk crossed his arms over his chest, eyes narrow with anger. Scott had to jerk his legs out of Kirk's way as Kirk stepped forward into Spock's personal space. Chin lifted so that they were nearly eye to eye, he demanded, "Who's the captain, here?"

Quietly, Spock said, "You are."

"And who's the first officer?"

"I am."

"Then whose orders are we following?"

Spock knew the flash of defiance was visible on his face. He was perfectly willing to follow orders, but he would _not_ be humiliated. "Mine."

Kirk stared at him for a moment, the tip of his tongue emerging to trace his lower lip. "Right. Explain that leap of logic to me. In five words or less, tell me why I'm not allowed to have my coffee."

"Urgent laundry system repairs." Spock deliberately paused and sniffed the air. "Sir."

Kirk flushed. "Fuck you very much too, Spock. I'll be in the showers." His back was very stiff as he left.

He was, as Spock had never been more grateful to know, not entirely unreasonable. While Kirk couldn't always be counted on to respond to logic, a small and calculated jab at his pride did the trick. Spock was sure it did nothing to help their tense relationship, but he knew of no other completely reliable way of getting through to Kirk.

About to take a meal replacement from the cupboard, Spock froze when he heard McCoy roar, " _Spock_!"

He closed his eyes briefly and surrendered the possibility of eating before 0400. Then he emptied his tea into the recycler and set the cup in the sonic washer. "The laundry system, please, Mr Scott," Spock repeated, tugging his jacket straight just before he exited the galley.

"There is no need to shout, Doctor McCoy," he said calmly, stepping into sickbay. "I was in the galley."

If anything, the man looked even more furious. "You think I waste my time keepin' track of you?" McCoy demanded. "Rather not have to look at your pointy green face at all."

Spock clamped down on the urge to assert that his face, far from being pointy, was unattractively blunt-featured by _w'l'qn_ standards. There was no logic in attempting to reason with a drunk xenophobe.

 _And yet_ , said a voice in the back of his mind, _he doesn't seem to mind Gaila_ \--

"May I be of assistance?" he asked instead blandly.

McCoy kicked one of the crates of medical supplies sitting on the deck around the dispensary door. "Airlock these."

Spock blinked and took in the unbroken seals and pristine packaging on the crates. "For what reason? They are brand new."

"They're useless and I've got a full order of medical supplies comin' in, I don't have room. Get rid of 'em."

"I assure you they are not useless. The dispensary was stocked by the Vulcan Science Aca--"

"Exactly my fuckin' point!" McCoy roared. "Half of that shit would outright poison a human, and the other half wouldn't do a goddamn thing."

It took an effort to keep his voice even. "As much as you clearly wish otherwise, Doctor McCoy, this crew is not entirely composed of humans. In the event of a medical emergency, any or all of this could be required to--"

"One," McCoy snarled, lifting his forefinger, "in the event of a medical emergency you could bleed out on the floor and I'd clean it all up with a song and a fuckin' smile. Two, even if I were of a mind to help you out, I wouldn't know what or how much to give you of any of this. Three, _you_ don't constitute an entire crew, so keeping this all would be overstocking by a factor of eleven. Four, I guess you're right. Put them in the cargo bay instead, we can sell 'em at the next outpost."

Spock threw McCoy a withering look, choosing to reply to only the most relevant of McCoy's points. "The authorities will be on alert for the large-scale sale of any Vulcan property found aboard this ship, including medications, and many potential buyers will have also been made aware of this. Of course, should you _wish_ to take the most predictable and least intelligent course of action possible--"

McCoy's face was ugly with hate. "You pointy-eared, copper-blooded son of a _whore_."

Spock's entire body went rigid. For a long moment he could see nothing but McCoy's face, his ears roaring with the desire to break McCoy's snub human nose, to flatten his zygomatic bones and the round arches of his supraorbital processes, to render his face no longer capable of sneering with such vitriol, no longer a _face_ , no longer--

From a distance Spock realised that McCoy's snarl had vanished, replaced by an expression of very real fear. He had taken several steps back towards the dispensary, one hand extended with what he probably thought was stealth towards an open box of hyposprays on the shelf.

McCoy froze when Spock caught his eyes. With great difficulty, Spock wiped away whatever had been showing on his face.

Very evenly, he said, "I will store these supplies in the science labs for the time being, Doctor McCoy."

"Yeah," McCoy said, not moving an inch. "Do that."

Spock abruptly picked up a crate of hypospray cartridges and carried it across the room. Once behind the partition, he dropped the box almost immediately on a lab table, his hands flying behind his back and linking together as if to remove them from use. Eyes shut, he stood and breathed and thought of _nothing_ until he came to the realisation that he was clenching his fingers so hard that dull pain was echoing up his wrists.

If McCoy thought that Spock took a suspiciously long time behind the partition, he said nothing; when Spock emerged some minutes later, the doctor was nowhere to be seen. Spock jerkily shifted all of the rejected crates into the science lab, stacking them on tables with a reprehensible lack of organisation. It was, however, _his goddamn lab_ and he could do as he chose.

Disturbed by his loss of control, Spock left the lab as soon as possible. Clearly he required more time to regain his controls before he subjected himself to such a stimulus again. His self-control was nowhere near as complete as he had thought: as unacceptable as McCoy's insults had been, Spock bore the greater share of responsibility, for he had taunted McCoy first.

"Computer, locate Lieutenant Uhura."

" _Go fuck yourself_ ," the computer responded in _w'l'qnir_.

One eyebrow lifted, Spock headed for the bridge. Definitely an error in the programming.

His intuition proved correct. The bridge was empty save for Uhura; in accordance with Kirk's policy, only one person had to watch the bridge when the autopilot was on. Uhura was bent over the communications console in deep concentration, typing and clicking with adroit speed, her hair a dark silky waterfall down one side of her neck. The severe hairstyle drew the fine bones of her face and neck into stark relief. For a moment, quite without warning, Spock was struck by the thought that any _w'l'qn_ would find her beautiful.

"Lieutenant," Spock said. "Are you aware that the computer informed me to go fuck myself?"

" _Brratt_." Uhura reached across her console and picked up a translucent plastic datasheet, stylus poised to make a note. "That's my error message. What did you tell it to do?"

"I asked it to locate you. Prior to that, the computer's vocal matrix stalled when I asked it for the time, and then the digital display informed me of the time incorrectly."

"I converted the systems into Terran time."

"I am aware of that. I am certain, however, that the Terran time-keeping system has neither thirty-six hours nor eighty minutes, and that terms such as 'sub-Terran hours' and 'a-yem' are not used."

She swore more virulently in Cardassian. Spock was impressed by her confident handle of the irregular conjugations. "I'll handle the locator function. Can you reset the chronometers?"

"Certainly, if you will provide the coding you used to convert the system."

Uhura handed him another datasheet, already entering commands into her console. Spock studied it for the brief moments it took to reach his own console. The errors were apparent almost immediately.

"In the future, Lieutenant," he said, "I believe it would prevent a great deal of trouble if you allowed me to write the programming for this ship."

Her chin lifted. "I don't have any real training in computer programming."

"That much is evident."

She didn't look up from her console, her too-serene expression displaying no reaction to his censure. "That bad, huh."

Yet again, Spock noticed only after the fact that he had offended. Uhura was not his mother and could not be expected to understand that _w'l'qn_ social customs placed no emphasis whatsoever on blunting truths. He attempted to soften his criticism. "The solutions you attempted were creative, but they only highlight your inability to fix the problems properly."

" _Correct me, teacher_ ," Uhura replied in near-perfect _w'l'qnir_.

Spock lifted his attention from his console to stare at her. The language she could have hypothetically learned through a translator or pirated teaching program, but the proper employment of idiom was rarely covered by such methods. At his silence, Uhura looked up at him.

"Rather than completely recalibrating the chronometers to run on Terran time, you attempted to write a patch that would have the computer convert Vulcan time into Terran time and display the latter when asked. The conversion is inexact, however, so the mathematical formula given by your patch would result in a loss of one Terran second every 2.4771 Terran minutes. It would take a far more complex formula to convert correctly. Furthermore, the math is wrong."

The corner of Uhura's mouth twitched, but not far enough that Spock could tell whether it was meant to go up or down. She returned her attention to her console, and Spock did the same. "That bad."

"Who taught you Vulcanir?"

"Starfleet."

"I was unaware that the Terran-Orion Union possessed such extensive knowledge."

"They don't-- or didn't, rather. Books, recordings and a couple of programs smuggled through the Blockade, mostly. When I left, I was Starfleet's foremost expert on vulcanoid languages, which says more about their lack of knowledge than my abundance of it. The Academy's now teaching two courses whose syllabi were based on my research papers." She spoke with no detectable trace of pride. "Of course, I've since learned that at least one of my major hypotheses was wrong, so some of the course material's also wrong."

"I cannot see it being a detriment to us that Starfleet is teaching its cadets incorrect information."

"That's what Sulu said. Apparently people have been _deliberately_ trying to sabotage the Starfleet curriculum for decades."

Spock was intrigued. T'Pol had filled his childhood with stories of Terran rebels and vigilantes, but had always acknowledged that a taint of historical inaccuracy lay almost inseparably over every story that was interesting enough to be tweaked into a legend. The prospect of real-world rebels both technically subtle and emotionally bold enough to take on Starfleet was... "Fascinating."

Uhura looked at him sharply. "Don't sound so surprised. Not everybody on Earth is as Orion-friendly and pro-slavery as you people inside the Blockade seem to think. Underground resistances have existed as long as the Union has."

"I did not mean to imply--"

"I don't care." The tight pinch of her mouth spoke volumes otherwise. "I couldn't really tell you anything else about the resistance. For me it was never anything more than an urban legend until I reached Free Space. Ask Kirk."

"Kirk is part of the resistance-- resistances? You have used both the singular and plural."

"He's never been to Earth, so he can't be. His mother was. And the plural is technically correct because multiple separate groups exist, but the singular is more commonly used because it's impossible to distinguish which group is responsible for what acts, and they all work for the same basic cause anyway."

Spock blinked. Humans had never struck him as the type to keep their affairs to their own planet, or their grudges quiet. "Is there no resistance off Earth?"

Uhura looked at him with amusement on her lips and contempt in her eyes. "There's no such thing as a resistance fighter between Earth and the space border, Mr. Spock. Terran space is far smaller than Free Space, and much easier to patrol. There's nowhere to hide. And outside it, people like us-- thieves, terrorists, slave smugglers-- we're all the resistance there is." Her mouth twisted sardonically. "Welcome aboard."

Spock met her eyes unflinchingly. "Glad to be here."

Uhura held his stare for a few moments before she dipped her head in acceptance, her regal face clear of any expression that would tell Spock what exactly she thought of his words. They both returned to their work.

Save for McCoy, Kirk's crew seemed to practice a far greater degree of emotional concealment than Robau's ever had. They spoke to him in cool tones and regarded him neutrally, nothing ever displayed but wariness or mistrust. Kirk was the only one who expressed anger to Spock, but that didn't mean Sulu and Uhura didn't feel it.

Perhaps it was the difference between being a fifteen year-old trainee and a nineteen year-old superior. Perhaps it was the difference between being a new addition whose presence the crew had been forewarned of and one who had walked into the group mere days after their last captain had been crippled. Perhaps it was the difference between a crew of sometimes-smuggler cargo runners and a crew of full-time pirates.

"Answer _me_ a question, Spock," Uhura said a few minutes later, breaking the silence. "You speak Standard well enough to know that it doesn't have official formal and informal dialects. Why does your syntax change so drastically?"

"You refer to the differences between my language the first day and now."

He saw her nod out of the corner of his eye.

"I was raised to naturally use scientific language and formal syntax. However, I have been trained in the use of slang and conversational syntax, and it was that which I largely employed on the day that I joined this crew. Furthermore, that day, I was... under considerable stress."

"You were trying to pass."

"No. Were I trying to pass as Romulan, I would have utilised a far different accent and syntax, as well as an entirely different attitude and manner of carriage."

"I mean you were trying to make yourself more like us."

"The line between subversive infiltration and setting somebody more at ease is wide, Lieutenant."

"Not from where I'm standing," Uhura said coldly.

Spock replied without thinking, as he would have to any _w'l'qn_ classmate or peer. "Then I suggest you move."

The jibe would have bounced off a _w'l'qn_ , seen not as wordplay but an instance of stupidity in taking language far too literally. At best, they might have recognised that it was intended to be humorous and attributed it to the workings of strange Spock's unusual mind. It was only after Spock had spoken that he recalled Uhura was no _w'l'qn_ , and-- he looked up quickly to see that her mouth was a flat line and she was focused on her console with angry intensity-- he had offended again.

" _Sulu to bridge_."

Spock activated the pickup on his console. "Bridge."

" _What time is it_?"

"Three-hundred fifty-one hours."

" _The clocks are wrong_."

Spock gathered from context that the unfamiliar word was an archaic form of 'chronometer'. "I am aware of this problem. It is being rectified now."

" _How long_?"

"The repairs should take no longer than thirty-two minutes."

" _So the alarm'll be back online then_?"

"If you have set a personal alarm, it will have to be reset after the new programming is installed."

" _In half an hour_."

"Thirty-one minutes."

" _Never mind. You know what? You can just call me when it's oh-eight-hundred_."

"I beg your pardon?"

" _A wake-up call. At eight-hundred hours_."

"This is not a part of my duties, Lieutenant Sulu."

" _Well, you're the one that broke the clocks_."

"I--" Spock stopped abruptly. His mother had been quite clear that humans considered it bad practice to place responsibility for a problem on another person, even when that person was rightfully responsible. He could feel Uhura's dark eyes on him as she awaited his response, neither volunteering the truth nor asking Spock to cover for her. Watching. Taking the measure of him.

" _You're the one that set the clocks at the outpost, and you're the one that's writing all the new programming, so if there's a problem with the clocks it's yours_."

The logic was essentially sound, though it excluded the possibility of a second programmer working on the system without Spock's permission. Nonetheless...

There was no reason to cause unnecessary conflict. It would be far simpler for Spock to assume responsibility for the malfunction of what were admittedly _his_ systems and perform the near-effortless task Sulu had asked of him. "Affirmative," Spock replied. "I will wake you at eight-hundred hours, Lieutenant."

" _I... Yeah. Right. Sir_."

The com went dead before Spock had dismissed Sulu. It would have been an infraction meriting verbal citation on the Luther King.

 _But_ , as Spock reminded himself for the sixty-third time, _this is not Robau's ship_. Uhura and Scott were both former Starfleet officers, but their desertions essentially summarised the level of respect they held for military procedures. Spock was unsurprised that Pike, once a Lieutenant, and Winona Kirk, formerly a Lieutenant Commander, had neglected to impress Starfleet-grade discipline on Kirk. Robau's crew, on the other hand, had consisted largely of career professionals with lifelong involvement in Starfleet, all of whom had largely seen no reason to run a ship with anything less than military discipline despite the lack of court martials or, indeed, a court of any kind.

Uhura spoke in a low voice. "I didn't ask you to do that."

"As I am aware."

Her tone was significantly sharper when she said, "I didn't _need_ you to do that."

His hands still on the touchpads of his console, Spock deliberated for four seconds before replying, "I would attempt to defend my reasoning, Lieutenant, but somehow it strikes me that nothing I could do at the point will appease you. I realise that I have caused offence, and I will excuse myself now. My presence here is unnecessary."

A few swift keystrokes sent the partially finished coding to his personal account on the _Enterprise_ 's server. With that, Spock rose and turned to leave the bridge.

"No," Uhura said abruptly. "I--"

Paused halfway to the door, Spock glanced back at her. Uhura was still standing at the communications console, facing towards the front of the bridge and staring down at the lights and screens of her station. Spock's eyes lingered on the thumb resting against her left temple, the two curled knuckles brushing her forehead.

Uhura took a breath and let it out shortly. "You haven't caused offence," she said, not looking at him. Spock was unsure if he was imagining something of an apology in her tone. "The offence was done by your gender directly, and your species indirectly. I understand it's wrong to take it out on you, but that doesn't change what I feel. _C'thia-ta lurdth_." Uhura dropped her hand from her face and looked over her shoulder at him. The long scar on her cheek stood out in vivid bas relief against her smooth mahogany skin. Isolated by the confession of her past injuries, she still stood tall and regal, and Spock didn't think he had ever seen anybody admit to their flaws with such grace. "Give me time."

 _My logic is incomplete_. It was the standard _w'l'qn_ explanation for a lapse in emotional control. If Uhura was fluent enough to understand the proper contextual use of the words, then she also understood the apology implied by them.

Spock inclined his head to her respectfully. "For the grace you have shown, time is the least I could give you."

Her voice stopped him as he made to leave again. "Sulu isn't a lieutenant," said Uhura. "He was never in Starfleet, and we're not all that strict about rank on this ship, except for captain and first officer."

Spock ran Sulu's abrupt last words through his mind again, and then Uhura's. He had argued and reconciled with enough of his peers to recognise a proverbial olive branch when it was being offered. "I see. Thank you."

Uhura made no reply. She no longer faced him, occupied once more with her console. For a moment, Spock studied the elegant line of her throat and the long, black hair falling down her back in shining pin-straight sheets T'Pring would have envied, were envy a _w'l'qn_ thing to possess.

Silently, he left the bridge.

A growl from the vicinity of Spock's midsection reminded him that he had missed his usual morning meal by 4.0412 hours, and the few sips of substandard tea he had ingested had done nothing but stimulate his digestive system. He headed for the galley once more, at the same time mentally continuing to write the chronometer code. His fingers twitched with want for a stylus as he reached a section of repeating decimals.

 _Find a suitable personal tricorder_. Spock's to-do list grew by another item. The science labs should have no shortage of brand new models. Spock's fingers twitched again, involuntarily, at the thought of the T'amtar'am Vel-series prototypes that Sharn Designs was rumoured to have given the Vulcan Science Academy for beta testing. The Academy's newest science vessel would surely have been stocked with the best available.

Scott passed him just outside the galley, sandwich and toolkit in their respective hands. "She's all cleaned up here, Spock. Er. Mister-- Commander Spock?"

Spock kept his eyes carefully clear of the obscenity of Scott's handheld sandwich. "A title is unnecessary, Mister Scott. Please send a report of the laundry system damages and repairs to my mail account when you have finished."

"Aye. Have that finished in a winking. I'd recommend ye steer clear o' the captain until I get the coffee problem sorted, but your tea should be just fine now."

"Thank you."

Scott chuckled at the audible measure of relief in Spock's voice as he headed down the stairs to the engineering decks. The occasional _clang_ s of metal on metal that continued to rise from below gave Spock more than a few doubts as to what exactly Engineer Gaila was doing to the air compressors. He had faith Scott could take the situation in hand.

Exactly 16.4 seconds elapsed before Spock's moment of quiet was interrupted again. He had just raised the cup of tea to his lips for a sip and registered the first sharp notes of spice when Kirk walked through the door once more.

"Did Scotty say the coffee was fixed?" he demanded, eyes fixed on the dark cup of liquid Spock held suspended before his mouth.

Spock, for his part, stood frozen. Kirk was only half dressed, his shirt held in hand and jeans unbuttoned far enough that Spock could tell he wasn't wearing underwear. The trail of coarse hair below Kirk's navel lead down to a curly, dark-gold thatch that peeked out of his open fly, and Spock remembered very suddenly how that hair had felt brushing his little finger curled around the base of Kirk's penis, how it had felt when Kirk had wrapped his hand around Spock's to guide him up and down, the blood-full veins and flared glans bumping across the pads of his fingers and--

He wrenched his attention away quickly. It had felt like an eternity, but Spock knew that there was literally no discernible hesitation to his answer of, "No."

"I heard him say--"

"He said it would be fixed when he had the time."

Kirk swore beneath his breath. He lifted his arms above his head and pulled his shirt on, worn polyester sagging over the bright pink skin of his taut chest. When he emerged from the top of it, he was wincing.

"You need to do something about the showers," Kirk snapped. "Fuck the laundry system, I want a shower that doesn't make me want to tear my hair out."

"I had not noticed a problem with the sonic facilities. They should be functioning normally."

"Sure, if I want a shower that peels half the skin off my body." Kirk thrust an arm towards Spock. Spock noticed again how pink his skin was, the colour tending towards an angry flush. "Look at this! Is this normal?"

"I have had no problems with the showers."

"Everybody else has," insisted Kirk. He went over to a cupboard and poked around through the tray of meal replacements inside, scratching his arm irritably. "Seriously, Spock, we need this fixed _yesterday_. Sulu has a rash in a place nobody wants a rash, and I'm not far behind."

A thought occurred to Spock. "The sonics are set to Vulcan norms. Human skin must be much more sensitive."

"Can you fix it?"

Spock ran through his list of tasks. "I believe it would be accomplished more quickly if you did. You will simply need to add a lower frequency setting to the preset options. The design manual is in the ship's database."

Unexpectedly, Kirk glowered at him. A shiver ran down Spock's spine, chased by the screech of errant psi-waves lashing across his shields. Spock felt the mental blow but not the specific emotion behind it-- barely.

"I'm a little busy already, Spock. Since you didn't deign to do the inventory I asked for six days ago, I've got two tonnes of supplies to sort through and nine hours to finish doing it."

"Captain, I did the inventory," Spock protested. "The report was sent to your inbox 4.6 days ago."

Kirk shoved a hand through his hair furiously and swore. "Four point six fucking-- I have an inbox?"

"In your personal account."

"Account on what?"

"The ship's server."

"The _Enterprise_ has a private server?"

"The _Number One_ did not?"

"Fuck no. You wanted to talk to somebody, you yelled down the hall at them. What the fuck do I need an inbox for?"

"I take it this means you have not read the other twenty-eight reports Mr Scott and I have sent there."

"Twenty--" Kirk covered his face with a hand, an abrupt breath drawn apparently to control his temper.

As if drawn by a tractor beam (Kirk could not see him looking; what was the harm), Spock stared at the way Kirk's thumb stretched the thin skin over his temple, the tender flesh at the tip of his ragged nail a crescent of bright, raw red. It looked painful, inflamed, _oversensitive_. Spock wanted to set his teeth over the groove of the first knuckle and lick the tip, taste the iron tang of human blood and make Kirk squirm at the sting of Spock's rasping tongue over exposed nerve endings. It was obscene, it was unprofessional, and it was almost painfully tempting.

These-- _humans_ and their constant display of _hand gestures_.

Kirk had only one set of vocal cords, but he evidently did his best to growl. "So I've been doing completely redundant inventory for the last _two days_?"

Very carefully censoring any sort of inflection from his voice, Spock said, "Evidently."

Kirk's fingers bent into claws grasping at the air as though he were wringing something between them. His knuckles went bloodless, the scars of countless bar fights standing out waxy white. Spock tensed, readying himself to block a blow. Then, slowly, the tension drained out of Kirk and he slumped against the counter, knocking his head back against the hanging cupboards.

"Okay. Okay, let's just... We get to our next stop in five hours. Let's just have our shit in order for then."

"Shall I show you how to access the _Enterprise_ 's server?"

Kirk waved him irritably on, indicating that Spock should follow him out of the room. Bewildered by the easy way Kirk had seemed to suddenly release all of his anger, Spock obeyed. That kind of abrupt calming was unheard of among _w'l'qni_. If a _w'l'qn_ 's control was incomplete enough that they allowed their emotions to rise so far, then there was no way for them to suppress all those emotions once more. Control, once sundered, was long in being rebuilt. And Kirk hadn't simply pushed his emotions back: he had _purged_ them. The telltale scrape of rage against Spock's shields had vanished.

It was the most bizarre and wonderful thing Spock had ever seen. He could feel the hypothesis of a research paper already forming in the back of his mind. Perhaps that flash of inexplicable self-control was the secret to how humans could manage to function in society and government while under the constant influence of their emotions. Spock's _w'l'qn_ peers and teachers had dismissed as impossible the rumours that there hadn't been a war on Earth for the last two centuries, but Amanda had always insisted it was so.

If humans knew something about emotional control that _w'l'qni_ didn't, a method of control that wasn't ruthless suppression... If _Kirk_ knew...

He could teach Spock.

Spock was distracted enough by his thoughts that he barely noticed Kirk leading him through sickbay and up the stairs. It was only when the door to Kirk's cabin hissed open that a shocking wave of hot, earthy scent struck Spock in the face and knocked him back into awareness.

"Spock." The swell of Spock's pupils brought Kirk's angry face into sharp relief, over-exposed rods and cones picking out every detail of his scowl: the fine lines around his narrow eyes, the individual hairs in his lowered alien eyebrows. "I know it stinks, but try to cope with my disgusting human smell until I get this server thing figured out."

Spock realised he had stalled in the doorway. Kirk had taken his hesitation for revulsion, particularly in light of Spock's earlier comment on his hygiene. "On the contrary," he said, stepping through the door and into the deeper well of scent, "I find your scent to be incredibly..." He let his eyes wander over Kirk's body, lids dropping reflexively into lazy arcs, before he finished softly, "...arousing. I was unprepared for the intensity of it."

He saw Kirk tense. The other man didn't move, didn't shift his suspicious squint. It was the first time Spock had confessed any sort of sexual interest since Kirk had confronted him about his detachment. Perhaps he was right to be suspicious: there was nothing uncalculated about the smouldering eyes Spock had cast over him, or the weighty pause in his words. But there was nothing false about the sentiment behind them, either.

Relaxing into something familiar, a thin smirk played around Kirk's mouth. "Yeah? Week-old BO's your thing?"

Spock pressed forward into Kirk's personal space, and his senses caught the faint ozone of the sonics over the deep, metallic note that couldn't be scrubbed away from Kirk's clothing. "You smell like rainfall, wet and mineral on raw sands. You smell like salt and hot earth, like... living things."

A tiny jolt ran through Kirk's body as his thighs came up against the edge of his desk-ledge, halting his drift backwards. The suspicion hadn't faded from his eyes, but his mouth was parted and there was nothing unwilling about the way he braced his hands against the desk-ledge and leaned back, opening himself up. Spock leaned in closer, suddenly realising that the movement was no longer intentional. He had set seduction in motion and lost control of it, his carefully designed distraction gambit spiralling out of his hands. Was it in Kirk's control, or not at all?

Without the will-power to resist, Spock let himself draw a deep breath against the side of Kirk's throat, almost brushing the tiny invisible hairs that stood on end and betrayed Kirk's reaction. He heard the muscles in Kirk's throat work, wet and strong. A breath hit his ear, stirring the hair on the side of his head. Not wanting to meet Kirk's eyes, Spock tipped his head further down against his shoulder, rendering eye contact impossible. The pungent sourness and deep musk trapped in the fabric of Kirk's shirt made his head spin.

"It may not appeal to you or your species, but Vulcans don't smell this way. We don't sweat, don't lose salt. It's... exotic."

The hoarse sound Kirk made might have been a laugh. "You know, I've been called a lot of things, but exotic's not one of them. Humans are common as dirt in space-- mostly 'cause we can handle living in the shittiest conditions. Like roaches."

"Not inside the Blockade," replied Spock, more hazily than he intended.

"No, not there. S'barely been two decades since it was illegal for us to set _foot_ on Vulcan."

"Fuckers," Spock muttered, quite deliberately.

Kirk barked a laugh. "Fuckers," he agreed bitterly. "Showed _them_ , didn't we?"

Spock hummed low in his throat, rocked by a rush of adrenaline and triumph at the memory of their successful heist. The resulting twinge of pain from his side reminded him sharply of the other results of that heist.

Trying to swallow down the reactions he was losing control of, Spock straightened and drew back abruptly. _Work_ , he reminded himself. His list of tasks yet to do was getting no shorter by the moment. He bumped his shoulder gently against Kirk, not trusting his throat just then.

Bright-eyed and wet at the mouth where he must have licked his lips, Kirk looked Spock straight in the eye and spread his thighs wider. His back arched just a little to better display his crotch. His hands were holding the edge of the desk tightly, anticipation humming beneath his skin and against Spock's psi-points like electricity.

Spock frowned and nudged him again. "Move."

Kirk's eagerness faded from his face, replaced by confusion. "What?"

One eyebrow raised, Spock looked pointedly down at the desk-ledge Kirk was sitting on. The computer's monitor had been raised, displaying a multitude of error messages. Kirk's ass covered half of the in-desk keyboard.

His cheeks a little pinker than usual, Kirk shifted off the desk-ledge. Out of the corner of his eye, Spock studied the unusual reaction, wondering just _what_ he had done to make Jim Kirk blush. Perhaps it was simply the remaining abrasion from the sonic showers that played tricks on his eyes.

 The chair at the desk creaked as Kirk flopped into it and jerked it roughly to the edge of the desk. Knowing that each cabin was equipped with only one chair, Spock didn't bother looking around for another. Hands folded behind his back, he arranged himself beside Kirk's chair as the human set his hands to the keyboard, determinedly not looking at Spock.

"Computer, cancel error alerts," Spock ordered. "Bring up log-in screen."

Kirk frowned. "I've never had to log in before."

"The public section of the server is always open. You will have to log in to your personal account on the work server in order to access anything pertaining to ship's business or functioning."

"And how's that work?"

"I have purged the accounts of the Vulcan crew that were registered to this ship. All the network passwords and firewalls have been reset. Your log-in identity will be your full name comma rank, no spaces. Since you have not changed it, your password will be _enterprise_. I took the liberty of adding several of my own security precautions."

"Great. I'll have 'em open in a couple hours, tops."

"You intend to break the security on your own ship?"

"How else do I know it's solid? Bet I can break yours before you can break mine."

Spock allowed himself a glow of amusement. "I scored 100% in Computer Systems." But it was barely a heartbeat before it faded. He recalled the ruthless efficiency with which Kirk had knocked out Spacedock 19's life support, the way he had started to _anticipate_ Spock's orders during the blistering rush of the cold start, as though he had intuited within minutes what certain key combinations and settings did...

 _Double-check server firewalls_ was added to his list.

Very shortly, it became apparent that whatever Kirk's talent with pirated electronics, he knew absolutely nothing about the _w'l'qn_ style of computer design. It was, as Spock was irritably told six times within the span of 4.3 minutes, very different from anything humans had ever come up with. Spock's quick task of showing Kirk the location of his inbox turned into an in-depth lesson on the _Enterprise_ 's computer systems. The massive blank areas in the bare-bones programming where Kirk was expected to fill in the design of his account to his own personal specifications were of particular trouble. Even after Spock turned on the 'extrapolate design' function so that the computer would start arranging windows and controls where Kirk had put them in the past, it took a great deal of time.

He was only grateful that Kirk was a quick and determined student. The breadth of his intelligence was obvious: even as the computer began to anticipate Kirk's preferences, Kirk started anticipating the location and function of unknown controls before Spock told him. What Spock found most shocking, however, was Kirk's emotional involvement in the task. Spock frequently caught himself looking up from the screen to find Kirk staring at the computer with an intense glare, his expressive face bathed in blue light from the monitor.

It shouldn't have been arousing. But Kirk was fast and emotional and intelligent; he asked sharp questions and expected immediate answers, challenging Spock's mind and keeping him perpetually on his toes. When Kirk was frustrated he expressed it with an entrancing lack of shame or hesitation. Spock was keenly aware of the 6.8 centimetres of air that separated his hip from Kirk's shoulder, a space that grew or shrank without warning whenever Kirk shifted. Not for a moment could he forget the sharp, alien musk that surrounded him, sinking into his clothing and hair.

How quick-- how simple it would be to let his hand fall to Kirk's shoulder, to touch his shoulder bare except for the 2.4 centimetre wide strap of fabric which held that side of his shirt up. How easily that fabric would shred under his hand, letting the too-large shirt fall to pool around Kirk's waist, baring his chest and the sand-brown nipples that made tiny points beneath the worn polyester-- and the noise Kirk would make when Spock bit one, sharp teeth on the vulnerability of human flesh, human muscles helpless to fight back when Spock shoved him from the chair, down to the deck-- beneath him, cool and squirming, salt-sweat springing to the surface of his abraded pink skin for Spock to drink, to swallow, to devour and possess and take and--

Spock jerked back to himself, his skin prickling uncomfortably. Even running back over the trail of his thoughts, he was uncertain when his mind had shifted from idle speculation to ugly fantasy. He tried to focus more closely on what Kirk was doing to the computer, unsettled by the alternative of focusing on himself.

His mind was turning into an unpredictable, dangerous place. Spock had entertained emotion for years before meeting Kirk, and handled it safely-- and suddenly here was Kirk, cracking his barriers, consuming his thoughts... making Spock truly think, for the first time in years, _this is illogical_.

It was a thought he had tried to avoid for years. Logic was the cold void that had separated his people from the rest of the universe and set countless worlds on the path to suffering as their cries went unheeded, ignored. Logic was a harsh, brittle thing that had always stifled him, that had molded a culture where his very existence was unwelcome. But, at last, Spock finally understood why logic could be preferable: when the alternative was this constant, choking, terrifying loss of control in his own mind.

 _He knows something about emotional control_ , Spock reminded himself. _He can teach me, I will learn, and I will have control of myself again_.

"If you will excuse me," Spock said abruptly, evidently startling Kirk. "You clearly understand the system now, and I have other tasks to attend to."

He barely waited for Kirk's dismissal of, "Yeah, go," before walking stiff-legged to the door and exiting. The rush of clean air in the hallway made Spock gasp.

"Fix the fucking showers!" he heard Kirk yell through the closed door. "And get me some goddamn coffee, you fucking tease!"

He wondered if Kirk was labouring under the impression that Spock couldn't hear him-- and, if so, what exactly Spock could do to correct the impression Kirk had of him. The thought depressed him. His job, his training, had always been to tease. He had never been asked to carry out a seduction to its full conclusion. But this-- whatever it _was_ that he was doing with Kirk-- was not a job.

Kirk was not Kaide, not T'Pring. Spock had no idea what he was doing, and no way to rid himself of the pain he felt at considering the loss of Kirk's cool, psi-sparking touch.

Across the hall, the door of Spock's cabin tempted him with the promise of solitude and silence and heat that could warm away the pervading chill deep-set in the muscles of his toes and fingers. A check of the list in his head revealed it to be too long for even a few minutes of indulgence. They were, as Kirk had said, expecting to make berth at their next stop within a few hours-- 1.48 hours, to be exact. Spock knew for a fact that there was last-minute inventory to be done, in order to ensure that the _Enterprise_ would not be found two months out into deep space without the necessary supplies. And he had still not finished re-programming the chronometers.

 _First things first_ , as his mother said. Then the responding flinch and grief-- what must she _think_ of him? Had anybody connected Spock with the crew that had stolen the _Enterprise_? Did she know what he had done, or did she simply think Spock had gone missing?

Breath shaking on the inhale, Spock shoved those thoughts aside. Dwelling on what he neither could nor would change was illogical. He had work to do.


	2. Chapter 2

Uhura's voice echoed through the _Enterprise_ at precisely 0810. "All crew members please be aware that we will be making berth at Betfirth Minas in exactly ten minutes. Bridge crew report to the bridge for docking procedures. All final inventories and processing must be completed and filed within the hour."

One eyebrow raised, Spock headed for the bridge. The _Enterprise_ dropped out of warp just as he arrived. The view of streaked stars abruptly resolved into the image of glowing dust and newborn star clusters. Uhura was still there, and Sulu had taken his place at the pilot's console, deftly switching the _Enterprise_ to impulse engines.

"We're being hailed for identification," Uhura informed him unexpectedly. Spock hid his startlement. He had no idea what Betfirth Minas was or why they were there, and he had thought that the crew, surely knowing their places in the procedure, would unlikely to acknowledge him. Certainly they had never looked to him for command in Kirk's absence, instead preferring to command themselves. But Uhura's eyes, dark and unrevealing, were fixed on him.

"Reply appropriately," Spock said, after a minute hesitation. He strode to his place at the science console and checked a number of sensors.

There was no habitable planet, no space station. The only thing his sensors picked up was a large ship, possibly of Cardassian make, hovering stationary at the coordinates Sulu seemed to be steering them towards.

He looked up at the viewscreen. Sure enough, a heavy cargo cruiser was coming into view, backlit by the bilious green galaxy. The name of the ship emblazoned on the hull had been half obliterated by collisions with space debris, but no part of it resembled 'Betfirth Minas'.

Spock had to tell himself that it was illogical to feel uncomfortable about asking a question when it was very possible that his continued lack of knowledge could lead to problems. "This is Betfirth Minas? How can a ship be accorded permanent coordinates?"

"Because it would be bad for business if they ever moved," Uhura replied, her eyes on a readout her console was giving her. "Just because they have engines doesn't mean they use them. It's less expensive than building a space station, and far easier to run if the Syndicate ever showed up."

"Actually, I'm pretty sure they sold at least one of the warp cores a couple years back," said Sulu. "They'd take a handful of credits over a functioning escape plan any day."

"What are we here for?" Spock asked. "This cannot be our supply station; they are far enough out that they, too, would have to depend on delivered supplies."

"Betfirth Minas is a fence," said Sulu.

"I am unfamiliar with the term."

"One, Betfirth Minas is a person, but everybody calls the place that as well," Uhura supplied. "Two, a fence is a kind of go-between for distributing cargo, illegal and otherwise. When you can't send a package legally and you can't transport it yourself, or don't have the contacts to take it for you, you send it to a fence. It's the fence's job to have contacts that will stop in, take the package and carry it where it needs to go."

"Using fences is a fine art," Sulu added. "Quality of the service depends on the fence. The best only take legal cargoes, insist on verifying the contents and cost a king's ransom, but they're guaranteed to deliver. The worst'll take anything and don't want to know what's in the package. They come cheap, but half the time a shipper just takes off with the cargo and never delivers it."

Spock asked, "Would that not terminate their contract with the fence?"

"There's no contract," Uhura said. "Everything's done freelance. Somebody shows up, takes a package that's going in the direction they're heading, and delivers it on the way. If a fence gives the package to a crew that steals it, then they lose both the shippers and the client. It's the fence's job to know who'll actually get the package there and who won't."

The nagging bit of intuition in the back of Spock's mind solidified. "We are going to be transporting stolen goods."

"Not necessarily," said Sulu, looking utterly unconcerned. "But don't ask. Betfirth Minas isn't the kind of guy who knows what he's fencing."

Spock stiffened. His voice came out very cold when he demanded, "Do the risks of working with such a fence not outwight the benefits? We are already on the run from Vulcan. Have you not considered that there may be law enforcement pursuing the theft of whatever goods we take on? We cannot increase the risk of drawing more attention to ourselves."

"Spock," came Kirk's deceptively calm drawl, "I didn't hear the beginning of this conversation, but I'm sensing a lot of disagreement here and I want it to stop. Like, now."

Spock's head snapped around to stare at Kirk, who visibly flinched. However, all he said aloud was, stiffly, "I would like my protest to this plan noted."

Kirk prowled around the command chair and looked over Sulu's shoulder at the pilot's console. "Noted. They know it's us coming, Uhura? I mean, a ship this fucking gorgeous isn't exactly what people expect out of us."

"Yes. They've agreed to a request to beam over three."

"Good. To the transporter room with me, Spock. Sulu, meet us there when we're parked."

In the hall, Spock said in a low voice, "Captain, I have already registered my disapproval of this plan. Why do you insist that I come? Removing both commanding officers from the ship is unwise."

"Because the one thing the _Enterprise_ isn't stocked with is weaponry, Spock. We couldn't bring much over from the _One_ and we haven't had a chance to buy any. Between us all, we've got exactly three phasers. Vulcan strength is an asset I can't pass up right now."

Spock followed Kirk down the stairs to the catwalk that ran the length of engineering, high above the machinery that filled much of the two-deck high space. Halfway across, Kirk leaned over the railing to wave down at Scott, who was crouched over a mess of discarded mechanical parts. "Yo, Scotty! Need you in the transporter room!"

Down below, Scott waved back. "Give me a wee sec, captain."

They reached the far end of the catwalk and turned down the staircase that lead down to the main engineering floor. Kirk, who had been digging inside his jacket, thrust a small phaser at Spock. "Can you shoot?"

Spock's fingers curled around the cold metal. A rush of familiarity ran through him, chased by determination. He checked the battery, cleared the barrel, snapped the gauge back and forth in quick succession to make sure that the stun and kill settings operated smoothly before putting the safety back on. Kirk's eyes followed his deft movements. "Of course. Just don't make it necessary for me to."

Reaching the transporter room on the very lowest deck of the _Enterprise_ , Spock paused to slide the phaser into the waistband of his pants. Neither his jacket nor his pants offered pockets that were convenient to draw a weapon from. The cold metal made his skin shudder with equal parts stimulation and revulsion.

Kirk was smirking when he looked up. "So is that a phaser in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?"

Spock only raised an eyebrow. Kirk's tired flirtation was one thing, but he was genuinely uncomfortable with the level of arousal the human seemed to derive from his handling of a lethal weapon. What was sexually arousing about a tool used to kill?

Sulu arrived in short order, still strapping on his katana. The belts crisscrossing his chest bristled with sheathed weapons. They boarded the two-man transporter pad, Sulu sharing a module with Kirk. Scott waved off the protest Spock tried to voice, calling the simultaneous beaming of two people with the same module, "Easy as pie. See you in a few minutes, lads."

The station that materialised around them was dark and grimy, the metal floor scabbed with dirt. It was as disreputable a ship as Spock had ever seen, and he was immediately on the alert. Something about the ship's atmosphere made him understand why Kirk would want as much fighting power as possible with him. The deck was sticky below Spock's boots.

Kirk grimaced as the powerful smell of burning oil hit them. One hand dropping to the handle of his holstered phaser, he lead the way down the hall to the only possible exit, a door that stood open at the end of the hall. All the other portals had been welded shut.

"Jeem--"

"--Keerk!"

Two voices greeted them from inside the office, both tinny with what sounded like the tones of a universal translator in poor condition. Kirk didn't bother even trying to plaster on a smile; his face remained as grim and impassive as ever as he stepped inside. "Betfirth Minas," he greeted.

Spock sized up the alien seated behind the desk. Bathed in the orange glow of numerous heat lamps clustered overhead, the being's scaly skin was dull brown with bits of hard amber picked out by knots of jagged crystalline projections. The thick trunk divided into two muscular necks and two high-domed heads whose heavy jaws hung open, bristling with row upon row of craggy molars with no tongue or other language apparatus in sight. Two arms rested on the desk, sharp talons jutting not only from what would have been hands but all the way up either side of the forearms. He was entirely unfamiliar with the species, and not unimpressed by the being's apparent physical prowess.

Rocks ground in the alien's throat, translated into words by the metal box wedged between the juncture of its necks. "You come--" "--een such a--" "--nice new sheeep." "How much do you want--" "--for eet?"

"Not for sale," Kirk said tightly. "And I'm not playing coy. I'm not fucking interested in selling it."

"Eenterested--" "--otherwise?"

" _No_ ," said Kirk hotly.

Without thinking, Spock grabbed his elbow. He was standing in very close quarters with Kirk, and could feel the flare of snarling protectiveness that had surfaced inside Kirk without warning. Tight as Kirk's hands already were on his phaser and the knife hidden in his belt buckle, the last think Spock wanted to risk was Kirk leaping for the alien in rage. Either of the being's gullets could crush and swallow Kirk's arm in a single bite.

Kirk looked sharply sideways at him but said nothing. "Not interested at all," he growled, turning back to the fence. "I'm just here for a cargo."

"Bad deal, Jeem." "Where you going?"

"Anywhere. Give me whatever pays the most."

Betfirth Minas opened both maws wide-- wider, thought Spock in alarm-- and let out a roar that echoed deafeningly off the close metal bulkheads of the dim office. He had drawn his phaser and snapped the setting to stun before he realised neither Kirk nor Sulu had moved.

" _Jeeeem_!" screeched the translator. "You try--" "--to blinding meee?"

Kirk's hand slapped down over Spock's phaser, palm covering the blue 'stun' light that had flashed on at the base of the weapon. Realising what he had done-- _most likely a cave-dwelling species, adapted to very little light and extremely sensitive to photoexposure, as shown by the possession of small but functional eyes with proportionally oversized vertical pupils_ \-- Spock switched his phaser off. The light vanished, leaving Betfirth Minas to rub his eyes with the wet, rubbery flippers that had unfolded from the corners of his eyes.

"He was laughing?" asked Spock in an undertone, replaying the fence's earlier roar and Kirk's lack of reaction to it.

"Close enough," Kirk muttered.

"What for--" "--you do thees?"

"What can I say," Kirk drawled, suddenly all unconcerned insolence. Spock's inadvertent display of violence had apparently set him up to the role of dangerous, arrogant pirate captain. "He likes shooting things. I'd advise you keep a little quieter. Now, my cargo?"

"Not tell me--" "--to keeping quiet," Betfirth Minas said in a menacing undertone. But then he gave his tiny eyes one last slap with the flippers and retracted them, squinting to focus on Kirk once again. "You say--" "--best paying cargo?"

Kirk's eyes slid sideways to Spock for a long moment. "Best paying that's headed at least three months away from here."

"Nothing expenseeve going--" "--far."

The flare of Kirk's nostrils announced his frustration. He looked at Spock again. Understanding what Kirk was debating, Spock narrowed his eyes in return. "Take the long run, Captain," he whispered. "We need to put distance between Vulcan and us. Money is not worth risking your ship for."

"Give me the farthest run you've got, then," Kirk snapped to the fence, not replying to Spock. His irritation was still evident.

The alien roared again, that time somewhat less loudly. "Jeem, I always--" "--like you." "Have cargo here--" "--for five--" "--weeks. Nobody take eet." "Too far."

"How far?"

"Beta quadrant."

"In that case, I'll be taking the payment up front."

The translator disgorged a noise that was audibly as displeased as the one that emerged from the fence's chest.

"Take it or I'll leave the cargo," Kirk threatened, before Betfirth Minas could speak again. "What's worse, paying me so that you can get the rest of your money out of the owners, or letting that cargo sit on the shelf taking up space and getting you no money?"

"I pay you," the alien said sulkily. "Does not mean--" "--I liking it."

A third arm unfolded from behind the being's back, hinging on two elbow-homologues to reach over his shoulder. It lacked the talons of the more humanoid limbs, instead relying on six flat flipper-like tongues covered in soft, sticky cilia to pull open the desk drawer and search around inside it. Spock studied the curious appendage, fascinated by the apparently boneless structure. The flippers functioned independently, flexing as both finger and thumb, and despite their muscularity they were adroit enough to offer Kirk a credit chip and a datasolid-- presumably payment and instructions-- between the tips of just two flippers.

"Take cargo." One of Betfirth Minas' big, talon-covered arms unfolded to indicate the far side of the room, which lay in darkness.

"Turn on the lights," Sulu ordered, stepping in the direction indicated.

Grudgingly, the fence nudged the heat lamps several shades hotter, brightening the office just enough to bring the shelves into dim illumination. Squinting, Sulu lay his hand on several different sealed boxes before Betfirth Minas called his agreement.

Sulu lifted it down easily and brought it to the door. Having checked the contents of the credit chip, Kirk shoved it deep in his pocket, his hand moving back to his phaser. They began to back out of the office, a cue that Spock followed one step behind.

"Your sheeep--" "--ees so _nice_." "What you want for eet?"

"Not for sale," Kirk said tersely. His psi-waves were humming high-pitched and loud, a harsh whine that Spock didn't need to feel to interpret. Whether it was fear or anger or hatred at the emotional core, Kirk was tense.

"Can make--" "--good deal, Jeem."

"No."

As they were forced to go single-file through the doorway, Spock stepped in front of Kirk, forcing his captain to back out behind him. Standing at the edge of the pool of orange light, he saw Betfirth Minas' tiny eyes narrow at him.

"Thees ees Vulcan, Jeem?" the fence asked from one mouth, the other closing tight and lipless with a shriek as its molars scraped against each other. Spock had the distinct feeling he did not want to know what the alien's expression was supposed to mean. "I want eet."

"Shit fucking fuck," Kirk whispered harshly. His hand came down on Spock's shoulder and his fingers dug in through the leather of his jacket with what must have been all of Kirk's human strength. The pressure of his grip was clearly meant to make Spock keep backing out of the office. "No."

"How much--" "--for eet?" "Ten-thousand credits, Jeem." "Eleven-thousand."

"Maybe you've got me wrong," yelled Kirk, still holding onto Spock as they backed down the hall. "I'm Jim fucking _Kirk_. I don't sell slaves, I free them."

"I don't--" "-- _care_. Geeve me Vulcan, Jeem."

"You try to take this man into slavery, and I will kill you!" Kirk roared. "He's not for sale!"

"Twelve-thousand!" "Ees best deal you get!" More and more gravel was coming into the alien's rising voice, even through the tinny translator. A sealed box of cargo was thrown out through the door of the office. Spock ducked and shoved Kirk to the side, letting the box hurtle past them and strike the deck somewhere down the dark corridor with enormous force.

Behind him, Spock heard Sulu flip open his communicator. " _Enterprise_ , three to beam up."

Spock had long since drawn his phaser; behind him, Kirk had done the same, but the red glow from Kirk's phaser was not that of the 'stun' light. Kirk was still trying to pull Spock behind him, but Spock kept his body planted solidly in Kirk's way and did not let himself be moved. Whether Kirk intended to cover Spock from Betfirth Minas or charge at the alien, Spock refused to allow it.

The reached the dead end of the hall, boots crunching on fragments of broken plastic from the cargo box. One of Spock's feet slid on an oily patch with a horrid _squelch_. Listening to the continued screeching from the fence's office, Spock abruptly found himself wondering just how many beings had died at the end of that hallway.

"Spock, pick up the-- whatever it is," Kirk ordered. He had his phaser aimed down the hallway, its red light casting an eerie glow over his face in the darkness. "Fucking _now_ ," he snapped, forestalling Spock's protest.

Phaser still in hand, Spock knelt swiftly to the deck, feeling about for the contents of the broken box. Grime, grease and sharp fragments of plastic met his fingers, the disgusting cling of oil enough to make his skin crawl. Then he found the main bulk of the box, still intact. Hoping most of the cargo was still inside, he scooped it up and straightened to his feet just as the transporter beam took hold.

Spock's eyes stung as they were beamed into the bright lights of the _Enterprise_ 's transporter pad. Kirk had rematerialised on the module right next to him, their elbows and arms touching. Jolted by the unexpected contact, Spock quickly stepped away.

"All aboard," Scott said into the intercom immediately.

" _Got it. Jumping to warp_ ," replied Uhura's voice. " _Hard run, boys_?"

"Nah," Kirk said jocularly, all of a sudden grinning as though they had not genuinely been fearing for their lives. "He took a bit of a shine to Spock, but it's not like he tried raise the shields on us, did he?"

" _No. Now get your asses back on this bridge, I don't know how to fly this thing_."

"Oh, now look what ye done to my nice clean transporter pad," Scott complained, gesturing as they stepped off the pad, boots squelching.

Spock looked down at his boots, remembering his concerns about the filth on the deck. The slippery substance on his soles, however, was thick and bright yellow, and distinctive vegetative filaments were visible in the plasmodium. It was a slime mold, not congealing blood.

"My apologies, Mr Scott," Spock said. He unlaced his boots and removed them, lifting them clear of both himself and the floor. Meanwhile, Kirk and Sulu had left the room, leaving a clear trail of yellow mold and oily grime. With a last apologetic glance, Spock allowed himself to be waved out of the room.

Curious about the species of the mold, Spock took a moment to deposit his boots in a sterile container in the science lab. Then he followed Kirk and Sulu's trail to the bridge.

"Captain, are you certain we should have taken this?" Spock asked, of the box in his arms.

"Abso-fucking-lutely. Think of it as a bonus for putting up with that shit. What'd we get?"

"Datasolids of some kind."

Kirk groaned. "Don't tell me we ended up with some old fuck's top-secret love letters to his mistress again."

Spock raised an eyebrow. _Again_?

"Hey, last time we blackmailed a pretty good sum out of the guy," Uhura reminded him. "Give it here, I'll take a look at them."

She took the box from Spock, grimacing as though the oily film on it were his fault. It did not escape his notice that she moved away from him as quickly as possible, short of running.

"And that?" Spock inclined his head to the sealed black box that lay in Kirk's lap. In good light, he could see that it was made of the same black plastic but much smaller than the other box: 1280 cubic centimetres, with dimensions of 10 by 8 by 16 centimetres.

"That's entirely different. This is business. It goes into the safe and it doesn't come out until we get to the owner. Some of these things have self-destruct mechanisms on them, you know." Kirk waggled his eyebrows at Spock, his eyes bright with challenge. "Unless you'd like to see if we can crack this thing? I've done it before."

At his console, Sulu was shaking his head. "We barely got paid five thousand credits for this thing, Jim. No way it's worth a booby trap. Leave it alone."

Kirk rolled his eyes. "Set our heading for Central Station."

"Already done. Warp six?"

"Make it seven."

Spock padded to his station, receiving and checking the coordinates Sulu had logged. The instruments on his console hummed in perfectly tuned harmony as Sulu raised the throttle. "Central Station in 8.4 hours, captain."

With one hand resting on the box and a smirk on his face, Kirk swung the command chair around to face the front viewscreen. He thumbed his intercom, activating the pickup in the side of the chair next to his cheek. "All decks, this is the captain speaking. We will be arriving at Central Station in 8.4 hours. After this, our next heading is in Beta Quadrant, which estimated time of arrival is a really long fucking time from now. Please have all inventories and shopping lists logged within the next hour, or we're not going to buy whatever the fuck it is you'll wish you had out in the middle of nowhere three months from now. Also keep in mind we're not exactly made of money right now. Kirk out."

Spock had finished entering calculations into his console by the time Kirk shut off the comm. "Estimated time of arrival at the border to Beta Quadrant is at least 67 days, captain."

"Great, whatever. We're going a little farther than the border. And a word of advice, Spock? Don't ever tell Bones our ETA if it's longer than a month."

"It causes him stress?"

"It causes him a breakdown. He lives happiest in oblivion. He also doesn't keep track of the days, so we can usually get it past him until about seven weeks."

More bothered by Doctor McCoy's instability than he would admit to, Spock said nothing. He merely fixed his eyes on the box in Kirk's lap, watching Kirk's scar-knuckled forefinger tap out an erratic rhythm on the black plastic. It was distracting, annoying, and disturbingly attractive. In that moment, the image represented everything important in his life:

Kirk, his captain. Kirk, the object of his sexual desires. Kirk, the source of his conflict. And the mission.

 _But this mission_ , Spock thought as he forced himself to pay attention to his console, _should prove to be quite simple_.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy birthday to kitausu/OtakuLibra!

The first 6.79 hours of the 8.4 hour flight to Central Station passed with relieving swiftness. Before leaving the bridge to deposit their cargo in the _Enterprise_ 's safe, Kirk had made an offhand comment to Sulu concerning the ship's private server. It had become immediately apparent that Sulu had no clue any such thing existed, while Uhura knew of the server only as a vague section of the _Enterprise_ 's systems that she had had no cause to work with, only around. Spock's unthinking comment that such a lack of knowledge was perhaps negligent on behalf of a communications officer had not been well received.

Neither of them proved to be students as quick as Kirk, but the long session was incalculably easier on Spock. With Kirk away from the bridge, the absence of his psionic energy grating against Spock's shields was marked and jarring. Spock was astounded how much higher his productivity was, how much more smoothly his mental processes ran. His mind did not wander once, even when Uhura scowled over the bare-bones section of coding that had been eluding her and put the tip of her thumb in her mouth. Her teeth closed gently on the nail and the plushness of her lower lip was dented by the smooth nail while her human-pink upper lip touched the pad of her thumb.

Spock saw it, recognised it objectively as a sexual gesture and summarily dismissed it as irrelevant in the context of human culture. At no point did he descend into distraction or disturbing fantasy.  
 _  
Posit: If reaction A occurs in the presence of stimulus B, but not in the presence of stimulus C, then B is the trigger to A.  
Further posit: If B triggers A but C does not, then the triggering mechanism must be the difference of B minus A_.

 _But the differences between Kirk and Uhura_ , Spock thought as he guided Sulu through setting up his private account's security, _are vast and innumerable_. He calculated it would take at least three hours of meditation to properly consider each possible trigger and identify the correct one.

An illogically hasty part of him wanted to leap to conclusions, to accuse the two things that leapt immediately to mind: Kirk's body and Kirk's mind. There was a 95.7% probability that the latter was, in fact, a weighty factor in Spock's disability. The raw, untrained and brutally intrusive power of Kirk's mind was unlike anything Spock had ever dealt with. The fully telepathic beings that he had previously dealt with, such as Betazoids, had always been trained and polite enough to respect his mental shields. Kirk was no such thing.

But Spock's urge to place immediate blame on the former factor was a glaring show of his instability, of the reasons why he could _not_ trust his intuitive conclusions. Kirk's body was healthy, well-formed and desirable; he was handsome enough in his blunt featured alien way. That was absolutely no excuse for the decay of Spock's shields and his resulting loss of self-control. In point of fact, there was no excuse for it. Excuses were illogical.

 _Fact: The maintenance of mental shields and controls is the sole responsibility of the person whose mind they protect and order.  
Fact: My irrational behaviour indicates that my shields have been neglected.  
Conclusion: I am responsible for this abhorrently out of control mental state_.

"Do you anticipate a potentially dangerous situation upon our arrival at Central Station, Mr Sulu?" Spock asked.

The pilot's face was _w'l'qn_ -still. "No. As far as I recall, we haven't pissed off anybody in this part of space for a long while."

"And yet I understand that Captain Kirk was on friendly terms with Betfirth Minas when we arrived." The shape of 'friendly' in his mouth left no uncertainty as to Spock's scepticism.

Sulu was unmoved, his eyes remaining fixed on his monitor. "That was fairly typical Betfirth Minas behaviour. He wasn't pissed when we arrived, and he wasn't pissed when we left."

Spock raised an eyebrow. "That was not an angry reaction?"

"We're still alive."

Spock knew that he did a poor job of concealing his shock. Was Sulu _serious_? No amount of training had brought Spock any closer to fathoming the human propensity for lying and exaggeration, and all his talent at weaving falsehoods had not made him any better at detecting them, save for the rare occasion that he was faced with a truly appalling liar. Sulu was no such thing. He was as absolutely inscrutable as a _kolinahr_ master would have been, if _w'l'qni_ lied.

Spock's tentative interpretation of what Uhura did next was that she seemed to take pity on him. "Betfirth Minas knows better than to try to kill any of us," she said, flicking the end of her pony tail behind her shoulder. The long, glossy strands kept sliding back over her shoulder as she leaned over her console. "He might get jealous and greedy, but that's a species trait."

"For all the good it did them," Sulu muttered.

Spock cast a glance of askance at Uhura.

She continued to clarify for him. "Nobody even knows what his species is called any more, and there are so few of them left in the galaxy that it hardly matters. From what I understand they can't stand each other long enough to raise children, mostly because the formation of a child-rearing triad in their culture means having to divide the triad's wealth equally among themselves, which they refuse to do. That kind of greed was what lead to the last war on their planet, which culminated in most of the population being wiped out. The planet itself was turned into a heap of radioactive rubble orbiting their sun. Maybe four hundred of them survived to go out into the galaxy."

Astounded as he was by the staggering concept of such blind greed, the likes of which _w'l'qn_ had never known even in the darkest hours of pre-Reformation history, Spock let it show on his face. To his further surprise, Uhura's face broke into a wide smile and she laughed loudly at him, showing teeth that were very white against the darkness of her cinnamon-red skin. Her whole body moved with the sound as though she hadn't laughed in weeks and needed the release; as far as Spock knew, that was true.

"If you're trying to pass for human, Commander, you've got a long way to go," Uhura advised him. The laughter had stopped but she continued to 'smile with her eyes', as humans said. Her cheeks were lifted and her eyelids had tightened, crinkling the skin at the corners of them into fine wrinkles that went against the grain of the premature frown lines already present.

"The expression did not present as I intended it to," Spock inferred from her reaction.

Uhura shook her head so that her silky ponytail swished back and forth, raising one hand with her thumb and forefinger nearly touching. Spock's eyebrow shot up at the lewdness of the gesture (to rub one's forefinger against the thumb was to request a hasty session of sexual congress in _w'l'qnir_ slang) before he realised that Uhura was, in fact, making a human gesture that translated roughly to 'just a little'. It was also likely meant to be read with a token of sarcasm, as a minor error in Spock's facial expression would not have drawn such amusement.

"Why so interested in the station?" asked Uhura. Spock recognised that the inquiry was as carefully planned as any of his own essays into familiarity. "Are you planning to go down this time?"

"I think it necessary for me to make a short trip away from the _Enterprise_ ," Spock replied. He knew that all space stations, no matter how isolated, almost always had clothing and personal hygiene items available for sale-- fortunate, because Spock had neither. "My business will be brief."

Uhura frowned down at her screen, presumably at some new problem presenting itself. "It better be," she said distractedly. "We're only here long enough to load the supplies we've ordered and make a mail run."

"Mail run?" The term had confused Spock before.

"A chance to access our mail accounts from a stationary 4-Di terminal, because we can't send letters from the ship." All of a sudden, Uhura snapped an urgent look at Spock, her face as sharp and cold as Spock had ever seen it. "You haven't sent any messages from the ship, have you?"

"I have not," he said immediately, sensing that it wasn't an idle inquiry. But why would they be unable to access the 4-Di network from the ship? There was nothing wrong with the _Enterprise_ 's communications array; it was fully capable of sending a signal that would reach the nearest 4-Di satellite. The problem, then, had to lie with the crew...

Spock tipped his head as the answer occurred to him almost the moment he had summarised the source of the problem. "Ah. I understand. In order to send a message which can be replied to, one must also sent a hailing frequency and the identity code of the mainframe to which the return message is addressed. The _Enterprise_ could thus easily be located and tracked any time it came within the range of a 4-Di satellite."

"Not something a pirate ship wants. Crews have died because somebody couldn't wait to comm their girlfriend."

"The _Guevara_ and the _Crazy Horse_ ," Spock supplied, recalling two of the precautionary stories that had been related to him by Robau's crew. In the world of slave smuggling and piracy, life and career expectancies were short. There was no shortage of dead criminals from whose ill-fated example to learn.

From the corner of her black-lined eye, Uhura was regarding Spock steadily. Her tone was light, however, when she inquired, "Anybody you were planning to call?"

"Why?"

"If you had family, I thought you might want to let them know you're all right. Unless they're not that kind of family."

Not quite certain what Uhura meant, he simply agreed, "They are not."

"Disapproving or absent?" she asked.

He comprehended. _She refers to their hypothetical reactions to my leaving with a pirate crew_. "Unaware. Anything further is private."

Uhura didn't look remorseful for testing his boundaries, but nodded in acceptance. "Better than disapproving, I suppose."

"Indeed."

But it was entirely possible that video footage of the events at Spacedock 19 had been recovered by _w'l'qn_ authorities. Spock didn't know whether Kirk's destruction of the station's power generators had overloaded and wiped the video archives or not. If not, Spock's association with Kirk's crew and complicity in stealing the _Enterprise_ would likely have been disclosed, whether publicly or privately to only those concerned. Either way, had Sarek and Amanda learned by then of his actions rather than simply believing Spock to have vanished without notice, 'disapproving' would be the most trivial of their reactions.

Distracted by consideration of the unpleasant scenario, Spock very nearly missed the expression that flitted across Sulu's face. Over the shoulder that was not facing Spock, Sulu threw Uhura what humans called an 'incredulous look'.

Spock's eyes flicked to Uhura's face. Tension that he hadn't noticed gathering ran out of him when Uhura pursed her lips and shook her head slightly at Sulu, refusing whatever else was written on the pilot's face.

Spock had seen enough. Before either of the humans caught him watching, he turned back to his own console. Still, something loosened in his chest which approached relief. Uhura had refused to be scorned for assisting him. She had defended her own familiar overture towards him, and as good as defended Spock in the process.

Then, eleven seconds after Spock had seen the look on Uhura's face, he suddenly caught himself basking in the glow of emotion inside his chest. He ran the near reflexive check of his body's state that emotion always inspired-- and stark shock seized him.

Without any conscious decision, he had let the emotion unfurl and grow freely, let it fill him until he was _smiling_ faintly down at his console, lips loosely curved in some vague expression that Spock, in his sudden horror, imagined must have looked positively deranged.

He had not planned that smile. He had not calculated the degree of its curve or the surface area of teeth he would bare, had not had in mind a result to be accomplished by the expression or even a target at which to aim it. It had happened--

Spock struggled with the idea for a long, horrible moment, fighting the roil of distress in his mind, before the truth forced itself to the surface.

\--by _accident_.

Suddenly the bridge seemed too bright, the glaring lights revealing every fault and lapse in his control to Sulu and Uhura. Sulu was a bare 36 centimetres from Spock's side, close enough that a 14 degree rotation of his head would bring Spock's face into his peripheral vision. And what would he see, this scornful human whose flawless self-restraint was far greater than Spock's?

Never before in his life had Spock smiled by _accident_. Emotion had always been a private thing, permitted only to himself behind the false veneer of _w'l'qn_ control. His life on _w'l'qn_ had depended on his ability to conceal what he thought, no matter how disgusted or furious he had been with the ignorant people around him. _Never_ had an emotion taken control of him.

What would come next? Crying? Laughing? Shouting?

Beneath the lights, Spock felt as though he had suddenly looked down at himself to find that his body was half naked, clothes unravelled around his feet, and he had only just noticed. When-- _when_ \--?

He distantly heard himself make his excuses to Uhura and Sulu, rising from his chair and moving numbly towards the door. His eyes were fixed on the door of the bridge, everything beyond immediate _escape_ fading to a blur. Spock couldn't tell if he was even breathing, but thought in panic that if he drew a breath to check, something beyond his control might come out of his open mouth. Pain lancing through his side told him that his heart rate had spiked once again.

The thoughts pounding through his mind were merciless. _What comes next_? his mind kept demanding, in defiance of the blocking techniques Spock was desperately trying to run. _Assault the next time McCoy goads you? Rape when you lose yourself in Kirk again_?

At the end of the corridor, he ducked into the science lab and shut the door behind himself, entering the lock sequence. His hand was unsteady on the keypad.

Alone and surrounded by the still-disorganised mess of crates and boxes of medical supplies, Spock stood very still in the middle of his lab. His eyes skipped around the room, taking in the pristine work tables and machines that had never been used. Clean, orderly, analytical perfection. He didn't want to touch any of it with his trembling hands.

 _I require meditation. Extensive, intensive meditation_.

It was the only possible solution he could conceive of. There was literally nothing else a _w'l'qn_ could do to resolve mental confusion, short of seeking chemical treatment or the intervention of a healer.

 _Will you kill_? demanded the last ruthless seed of blunt, unflinching scientific truth-seeking Spock had in him. _Will you murder_?

" _Computer_ ," he said in _w'l'qnir_ , his voice almost belonging to somebody else, " _temperature to 60 degrees Celcius_."

For the first time unheeding of his scheduled shift and the duties of his rank, Spock let his legs fold beneath him and sank down on the hard deck in the middle of the laboratory, falling into the darkness of his own mind and rapidly losing himself to its turbulent depths.

*

Jim Kirk didn't consider himself the kind of guy who moped. Or was indecisive. He hated people like that, in point of fact. They were a waste of space in a fight and a waste of air on a ship. Being indecisive never got anybody made captain, and fuck all if Jim hadn't just made captain at nineteen. QED, he couldn't be indecisive.

He had the nasty feeling Bones would laugh in his face if Jim told him that.

A shudder ran down Jim's back at the thought of it. But he _did_ need to talk to Bones, and soon. Jim hadn't managed to make Bones sit down and talk to him for... weeks, now. After the Union ship had nabbed Pike and all the chaos that had followed, there'd been no time, and then suddenly Jim had found himself coaxing Bones through a full-on panic attack in the middle of the lounge deck on the Vulcan spacedock.

He remembered hot tears soaking through his t-shirt and onto his shoulder, Bones' trembling hands knotted in his shirt. Bones had been almost seven months sober since the last breakdown, and just like every time, Jim had _hoped_ \-- but Bones' breath had been booze-sour against his neck, reeking of the same sharp smell as the empty bottle of Vulcan vodka on the bench beside them. Whatever had done it-- Pike's injuries, or the brush with the Union, or losing Jensen and Balu, or having to dock at Vulcan-- Bones had been triggered hard. He deserved more of a follow-up than Jim had yet given him.

Getting Bones to talk about it was like trying to play nice with a Klingon, but he wasn't as opaque as he liked to think. The way Bones unconsciously reacted to aliens with pointed ears or green skin, the way a brush with Romulan soldiers sent him into a nerve-wracked spiral like no other kind of alien attackers ever did... he was clear as glass and twice as fragile.

If just making berth at Vulcan had driven Bones to start drinking the second he'd set foot on the planet, then having Spock aboard would be torture to him.

Fucking _Spock_.

Jim let out a short laugh at himself. It echoed back against him from the hollow metal chamber beneath the deck panel he had lifted. Inside was a well insulated, thick-walled safe just about the right size to contain half a dozen phaser rifles, if they'd had any.

The sealed black box that Betfirth Minas had given them fit easily. Satisfied, Jim shut the safe, locked it, and lowered the deck panel back into place. A pneumatic hiss informed him that the vacuum seal had sealed the panel shut tight.

He stood and looked down at the panel. Even to Jim's trained eye, there was absolutely nothing to suggest anything was different about that section of the deck. Without the blueprints of the _Enterprise_ that Spock had sent to his account-- kind of handing over the real keys to the ship, Jim supposed, giving up every last detail of her down to the metaphorical rivets-- Jim would have never been able to find the safe in the first place. When Vulcans built something, they built it fucking well, though somehow he hadn't pictured them as the type of people who would bother with a hidden safe in the first place.

Spock. That was everybody's problem, including Jim's: Spock and all the ways Jim actually _wasn't_ fucking Spock.

The memory of what had just happened on the bridge made Jim flush with humiliation all over again. No big deal, he'd asked if Sulu had known about the _Enterprise_ 's server. No? Well, nice to know Jim hadn't been alone, then. Uhura hadn't known either, not really. Any other day, Jim would have made a crack at her about not knowing the communications array on her own ship... and then Spock had beaten him to it.

And then proceeded to show everybody how goddamn much more he knew about the _Enterprise_ than Jim did. Just like when he'd had to sit Jim down and tell _him_ how to work the server.

Spock. Knew. Fucking. _Everything_.

Jim could see Spock's expression all over again, the one he'd worn when he'd found out Jim hadn't known the private server existed. Blank, maddeningly _empty_ \-- like Jim didn't affect him enough to spare even a twitch of expression, didn't make his green blood boil the way Jim knew it goddamn _did_ \-- hiding what must have been a metric fuckton of disdain.

 _Captain, I did the inventory. The report was sent to your inbox 4.6 days ago. You would have known that if you knew the first thing about your own ship. Yes, idiot, you just wasted two days re-doing what I had the efficiency to finish long before it would become a problem, instead of leaving it to the last minute before docking at a station_.

Cargo stored, Jim spun abruptly on his heel and stalked away from the safe, heading for the stairs that lead up from engineering. He couldn't go back to the bridge, not with Spock still there reeling off massively complex instructions about the computers like they came to him easy as breathing. Between thoughts of _that's sexy as hell_ and _no don't go there_ , Jim knew himself well enough to know that he would end up making snide comments at the whole thing, and Spock took that shit about as nicely as Uhura did.

Somewhere there had to be something that needed to be done...

Jim veered suddenly away from sickbay, heading back towards the communal showers. He could fix the sonics, and maybe then all the raw red patches on everybody's skin would have a chance to heal up. Jim's own back looked like shit, if the stares Scotty and Bones had been giving him were any indication. He hadn't looked, never looked at his back, but he'd reached a hand over his shoulder to test the damage a few days ago and found his skin hot and swollen up around the waxy lines of scar tissue mapped across his shoulder blades.

Jim could only imagine the scars were standing out bright white against the abused red. Nausea made his stomach roll slow at the idea that it would be easier for people to read the branded message that Bones had only been able to partially remove, all those years ago.

What did Vulcans have for skin, that they liked their sonics to feel like sandpaper made with glass shards? Spock's skin had felt smooth enough in the club in Sdvaar, from what Jim had felt running his hand across the small of Spock's back and down his pants... smooth, hot and weirdly dry, like cured leather stretched tight over hard muscle and the bony ridge of his spine.

Even as Jim's dick jumped at the memory, his mouth twisted sourly. Distracted by his irritation, he automatically waved a hand in front of himself as he approached the door to the shower room. It hissed open almost silently before he had to even slow his step to wait for the sensors to catch up with his movement. That was what reminded Jim that he was no longer aboard the _One_ , and the _Enterprise_ 's state of the art doors required no additional signal motion to trigger them.

 _So damn pretty_ , Jim thought affectionately, and rubbed his hand against the door frame as he entered the showers, or 'hygiene facilities,' as the sign on the door read. Uhura had stuck a translucent datasheet with the Standard translation written on it upon the door beneath the Vulcanir staff and spiral design. That was it; there was no Vulcanir male/female designation anywhere, which had been the source of-- had lead to-- well, Scotty had walked in on Uhura showering.

A bad, bad scene, that. The _Enterprise_ now had her first scar (because Jim wasn't counting the things broken by the cold start): a thin scratch on the hallway bulkhead just outside the showers, at about neck height, where the tip of Sulu's long knife had rested while the rest of the blade had been fitted nicely against Scotty's throat.

Shit had been tense for a bit. Scotty, fortunately, was a very understanding man. Given the bare minimum of information about Uhura's past, he'd been admirably accepting about why half the crew had flipped shit and drawn weapons on him less than ten seconds after Uhura had screamed, and suitably apologetic.

In Jim's mind, understanding didn't quite make up for the fact that Uhura had been shaking for the next half an hour, or that she'd apparently asked Bones for three days' worth of sleep aids that night. But it came as close as was possible, and Jim had learned just how cool Scotty kept in a sword-to-the-throat crisis, which was a quality that Jim very much approved of in his crewmembers.

Bathrooms on Earth hadn't been sex segregated since before WWIII, according to his mother, and of course out in space there were too many different kinds of aliens for anybody to worry about the binary sex system of one pink-skinned species, particularly one with as nasty a reputation as humans had. During the Terran Rebuilding-- a bullshit term for what happened between Vulcan ditching Earth and Orion showing up-- there just hadn't been materials available to construct separate outhouses in every refugee camp and mobile construction site trying to reclaim ground zero. Prior to that, of course, people had been shitting in rural fields or the gutters of burned-out former metropolises, and they were lucky if the place they were sleeping wasn't soaked in nuclear radiation. Mostly they'd had bigger concerns than who shared a toilet with them, things like impending nuclear winter and what coalition government was going to try to seize or seize back the territory they happened to be in that day.

After all that, separate washrooms just hadn't seemed like such a big deal to the human species any more. But showers... those involved full-on nudity and all the vulnerability that implied, not just a half shucked pair of jeans and a sheathed belt knife well within reach. Jim wasn't surprised that the thought hadn't occurred to the _Enterprise_ 's Vulcan designers, though.

At least the stalls were walled in, if only because the sonic hardware needed to be installed upright in closed spaces of less than six square feet. But where any human designer would have made the obvious choice of installing solid metal dividers, the Vulcans had used _transparent aluminium_. They had gone out of their way to make sure _nobody_ had any fucking privacy. The six rectangular stalls indicated that a bunch of people were supposed to shower at once, too. Jim wasn't sure what that said about Vulcans, except maybe that some of them needed a good punch in the face.

Inside the first shower stall, Jim knelt down to type on the control panel set at ankle-height on the wall. He'd looked up the specs earlier and remembered them.

Really, programming a lower setting into the shower was just a matter of giving it a new sonic frequency, one a lot less likely to strip the varnish from wood. Easy. Evidently Uhura hadn't gotten around to translating the digital keypads in the shower into Standard yet, but it barely gave Jim pause. The standard Vulcan number pad was only 7x7, and he'd pretty much figured out the weird spirally symbols a week ago.

The species-specific details of the _Enterprise_ 's design just kept getting weirder and weirder: evidently Vulcans used their toes just as easily as fingers on control panels. Some part of his brain noted that the low-set panel even indicated that footwork was preferred sometimes; after all, there must have been a reason the controls weren't all at the same height. Maybe they liked to use their feet but couldn't in situations where shoes were more logical than toe-typing?

 _Aliens_ , said Pike's voice, _are more than just people with differently coloured skin or blood, Jim. You might get along just fine until the day you blow your nose in public and curse their grandmothers for whores. Little differences matter. Assuming they're just like you could be fatal. Never assume_.

 _Big words for a man whose only alien hire ever was Gaila_ , Jim thought, not a little resentfully. _He never had an alien First. What the fuck am I doing with a Vulcan_?

Half an hour later, Jim finished programming the last shower and got to his feet, surlier than he had been when he started. Something in his back popped from the amount of time he'd spent crouched down on the deck. When he tested the new frequency and stuck his hand into the stall, the vibrations against his palm were as gentle and soothing as the purr of an engine at warp.

One less thing for people to bitch at him about. Now Spock couldn't say that Jim didn't get things done. No more of that supercilious eyebrow, that cold Vulcan disdain for a _human_ who couldn't even--

Jim shoved the rest of the thought out of mind as frustrated anger threatened to eat up his throat like bile.

He had a ship to run and a decision to make, and soon. He couldn't afford to stay tied up over Spock the way he was.

 _But Bones first_ , Jim thought, and headed for sickbay with determination in his stride.

*

Seated tensely on the chair in his office, Leonard McCoy took a long swallow of whiskey without taking his eyes from the piece of machinery standing opposite his desk.

The frame was made of medical-grade steel sheathed in white plastic, a rolling base with a long folding arm that lifted or lowered to allow the device to be used on a patient in a biobed. The guts of the device were stacked neatly inside the damage-impervious, radiation-proof box bolted to the arm's support column, the door to which hung open to expose the ridiculously complex machinery inside. Leonard didn't know enough about Vulcan technology to put a price on the device, just that it was quite possibly worth more than the _Enterprise_ 's warp drive and engines combined.

It was, frankly, the absolute finest neural monitor he'd seen in his life.

Light gleamed off the sterile silver metal of the cap that hung hinged on the end of the folding arm, a cradle of deceptively delicate-looking bands curved to fit around a humanoid skull. Leonard shivered despite himself and chased it down with another sip of whiskey. He almost didn't feel the sweet burn of it going down his throat.

He'd never seen anything like it. Vulcans. Vulcans _would_ spend their time inventing a better way to look inside people's heads, the sick bastards...

The line of that thought got snagged in the Knot, snatched and gripped tight as fast as a catfish on his daddy's hook. Leonard could feel himself starting to get dragged inwards along with it. His gut wrenched at the sickeningly familiar sensation of skidding behind his eyes, like he was water being sucked down a drain, like gravity was letting go of his body and all the flailing in the world couldn't get him anchorage to resist--

Fire burned up his nose and down his throat, and the sudden pain of it was enough to break Leonard free. Cold sweat sprang out on his forehead as he hacked up the whiskey he had choked down wrong into the soft tissues of his sinuses and esophagus.

 _Thank God for reflexes_.

His breath still coming too fast, Leonard took another desperate gulp of alcohol, and then another. The wave of _too much too fast_ dizziness that followed was comforting and completely unlike the pull of the Knot. It blurred his head enough that the Knot went out of focus for a few long, blissful moments.

When his eyes refocused, the neural monitor still stood across from his desk, silent and gleaming.

Leonard swallowed again even though there was nothing left in his mouth. He put the whiskey bottle down and slowly stirred about the mess of PADDs on his desk, reshuffling them into something like order. Close to two dozen screens glowed with all the data and operating instructions he had been able to find on the monitor.

If Leonard had caught a nurse trying to operate a medical device as complex and potentially dangerous as a neural monitor with only two weeks of second hand education on it, he would have either thrown the unfortunate idiot from his sickbay or outright slapped them with a sedation hypospray, whichever was faster. Leonard, on the other hand, had over a decade and a half of medical experience, and he was more than passingly familiar with neural monitors. He'd just never seen one quite so advanced. It was light years ahead of anything Leonard had ever even heard of.

Of course Vulcans wouldn't share their technology, not even when it could be used to save lives. Of course they wouldn't--

He jerked himself free of the undertow before it could do much more than threaten. The last drink had done its job, then. A little unsteadily, Leonard got to his feet. Feeling the tremor in his knees, he paused to grab a tricorder from his desk.

Switching through the settings was easy, his muscle memory unimpeded; the tox screen came up with a blood alcohol content of only 0.059%. Still good to go without the Metastecil, then. Still below the .075% of Jim's _call me_ rule.

 _Dumb kid_ , Leonard thought with a comfortable measure of fondness as he moved towards the neural monitor. By the time Leonard hit 0.075% BAC, he was usually beyond the state of mind in which he'd call Jim over, whether to join in the drinking or just keep an eye on him. But it was hard not to promise Jim shit like that.

The monitor rolled easily across the deck to stand in front of his desk chair. Leonard shut the circuitry box and locked it with the thumb print he had encoded all of sickbay's equipment to. Every lock and keypad in the place had been standing open when he'd arrived, set up and waiting for somebody to register their ownership of it. _Goddamn beautiful_ , he'd thought of it all at first, and _never had brand new tools like this_ , until the Knot had warped his brain into _didn't have tools like this when it would have saved Jocelyn_ and then _oh Jesus no Jocelyn Jocelyn baby my baby noooo_ \--

Leonard sat down in his chair again. On eye level with the skull cap, he gingerly adjusted the socket that attached it to the arm.

 _What the hell are you doing, Leonard? Letting this Vulcan voodoo screw with your brain? Lucky if it doesn't leave you _< screaming pain make it stop blackness sick drowning baby my baby pain>_ crippled and drooling, or_\--

He almost stopped then and there, his vision blacking as he was wrenched screaming into the Knot without warning. It passed as suddenly as it came, however, and left Leonard drenched in cold sweat with his hands clutching the metal bands of the cap for support, knuckles bloodless.

 _Fuck this shit_ , said a voice in his brain that sounded like Jim in a genuinely hysteria-inducing way. Leonard pulled the cap over his own head.

Professional confidence took over as he adjusted the bands around his skull. The soft gel lining pressed cool against his skin where the bands rested over his forehead, temples and nape. The round ends of two curved arms pressed firmly into the hollows to the anterior and lower of his mastoid processes, close enough to the pressure of cold thumbs that Leonard shivered again.

There was a facial attachment to the cap, but he didn't bother with it. Not only did the silver mesh screen look disturbingly like an instrument of torture from the goddamn Dark Ages, but the operator's manual had stated very clearly that the screen and its nub-studded inner surface were only necessary for taking readings from 'beings with psi points sufficiently developed and maintained to serve as conduits to independent mental contact'. Leonard parsed it as _not humans_.

Several clear, wafer-thin screens folded out from the support column, automatically lit up with readings that were already being returned from the sensors embedded in the gel. Despite himself, Leonard was impressed with the machines intuition as it guided him to adjust the position of several bands that were giving poor readings.

He recognised the brain patterns that were showing up on several screens, and could even see exactly where and how much the whiskey was affecting his brain. After entering a few tentative commands, some of the screens stopped showing warning messages informing Leonard that he was brain dead or comatose. He'd always been right in assuming Vulcan brains were pretty fucked up, then, if that kind of alpha wave activity was what passed for brain death-- fucking _Vulcans_ \--

And the Knot squeezed tight, wrenching Leonard in on a ribbon of disgust into a sticky tangle of _< hatehatehate>_ that made his whole body stiffen, made his hands go rigid--

He let it pass slowly, naming the bones of the Bolian body from the feet up. His hands surgeon-steady even with the Knot still lurking in the back of his mind, its barely submerged shape still distorting the surface of his thoughts, Leonard picked up a particularly helpful neurosurgeon's thesis on human psychic trauma and scrolled down it with an admirable façade of control.

 _Yes, Leonard_ , said a voice whose thread floated dangerously close to the vortex of the Knot, a trigger that didn't bear thinking about, _tell yourself you're not looking for crazy_.

His throat started to tighten, bit by painful bit, as he scrolled through diagram after diagram of neural readings whose highlighted abnormalities resembled far too closely those of the monitor's lower leftmost screen.

 _Remember why you didn't do this years ago? Because you don't want to know. Didn't chase it because the difficulty of getting access to a decent monitor was excuse enough to avoid trying_.

Flat. Flat. Even without the research in front of him, Leonard would have known that human theta waves shouldn't be that fucking _flat_. He was reading on the projection level of a Ferengi-- that was, not projecting at all. True psi-null.

That lack of energy projection occurred almost exclusively in babies with birth defects affecting the temporal lobe to the point of retardation, those whose genome included a few crucial, artificially fucked-up genetic sequences that had slipped through screening unnoticed because of the sheer rarity of them occurring in one parent's DNA, let alone two whose combination would allow the sequence to present. With the destruction of WWIII piled on top of the Eugenics Wars, the already minuscule number of test subjects that had survived the Augments' attempts to rewire the human brain had been cut again, and all the records lost so that identifying any possible survivors or offspring thereof had become impossible. If any descendants existed, it wasn't public record; if the descendants themselves even knew about it, they kept it quiet, and for damn good reason. People didn't go around saying that their ancestors had been KKK or Nazis or Marriage Crusaders, either.

Leonard could not possibly be one of those descendants. His mental capabilities bordered on genius, and on top of that he knew his genome back to front. The neural anomalies were there, but the genetic abnormalities weren't.

 _You. Don't. Want. To. Know_.

And that spike-- that juddering, frantic, spike-studded readout that should have been absolutely _nothing_ humanly possible but smooth hills--

For the first time ever, Leonard came face to face with the Knot.

Funny how he'd always pictured it more like an abscess, black and putrescent, leaking poison into his brain stem.

A lump lodged in his throat as he stared at it. Something like anguish rose in his throat when he saw the wavelength jitter and surge in time with the _< hatehatehate screaming blood>_ twist of the Knot. Caught up in the sight before him, Leonard was too slow to drag free of the pull while he still could. And then there were

 _< fingertips pushing pushing pressure pain white lights behind his eyes pushing fingertips pushing>_

warning alarms screaming at Leonard as he scrabbled blindly at the skull cap, yanking it from his head without a care for the priceless machinery. As soon as he wrenched one of the bands from his temple, all the rest of them snapped wide open in what Leonard would have recognised as a beautifully designed self-preservation mechanism had he not been dry heaving over the edge of his desk.

The base of the bottle clattered against the desk when Leonard snatched desperately for it, nearly knocking it over. _Make it go away, make it_ \--

Whiskey burned a trail from his lips to his stomach, hit hard and bloomed wide. It was only when Leonard found himself gasping for breath as he stared up at the ceiling, draped limply back in his chair, that he realised the bottle was dangling empty in his numb fingers.

Dazedly, he pushed out a leg, found the base of the neural monitor and toed it away from him. He heard the casters rolling almost silently over the deck, then a jarring clatter as it fetched up against a bulkhead. He didn't move.

< _pushing_ >

"Bones? Bones, you in here?"

Leonard closed his eyes in exhaustion. He knew without checking a tricorder that his BAC was going to hit at least 0.17% when the whiskey hit his blood stream.

Something nearby hissed. It took Leonard several seconds to identify the sound as that of the door opening. _Never thought I'd miss the rattletrap on the_ One, he reflected distantly. _Makes it damn hard to tell when Jim's sneakin' up on me_.

"Swear I was just about t' call ya," Leonard muttered without opening his eyes. The effort to stay Jim's fluttering, pissed off mother hen impression was perfunctory at best, but it was all he could muster. For somebody whose only experience with a female parent had been that of a woman who taught her children to build IEDs at age seven, Jim sure could mother. He was almost as good as Leonard's great aunt, save for the conspicuous lack of ribbon candy. Leonard wondered vaguely if it had rubbed off from a side of Pike nobody else had ever seen.

" _Bones_."

Yeah. Fuck. Kid was growling. _You promised you'd tell me if you were going to drink this much_ blah blah and fuck it, no, that was not a twitch of guilt inside Leonard's chest.

“Fuck off,” he mumbled. _Wait, no_ , he thought a moment later, _not that_.

“Never happen,” Jim said, relieving Leonard of the struggle to find the words to rescind his insult. Jim's hand touched the side of his face, calluses scraping over Leonard's stubble. “Geeze, Bones, you look like shit. I fixed the showers, if you want.”

“Mm. Not now.”

 _ <fingertips pushing> _

As though he had been burned, Leonard ripped away from Jim's hand, which prior to that moment had had been leaning into. His eyes flew open and stung from the sudden light, but Leonard could see Jim jerking away, backing off, and the sight of his blond, blue-eyed friend was enough for him to yank away from the Knot.

“Jim, Christ, don't touch my face!” Leonard grated. “Don't _ever_ \--” He had to trail off, rubbing his face with a hand that shook to remind himself that there was nothing pressing against his temple.

“You've never said anything like that before,” accused Jim. He hopped up on the edge of Leonard's desk, positioned so that his inner ankles brushed the outsides of Leonard's knees. Maintaining touch at all times, that was Jim. “Bones, what's wrong? Talk to me.”

“Fuck off.” That time, he meant it. “And take that pointy-eared bastard with you.”

“So it's Spock.”

“Jim, what the hell?” Leonard demanded. He lifted his head and tried to focus on Jim with bleary eyes. The whiskey was kicking in, which was the only reason he could talk about the Vulcan without wanting to kill something. “ _Why_? Why would you hire a goddamn-- Vulcan?”

Jim's face tightened. Yeah, he'd heard the way Leonard had spat the name like the worst insult in the world. Didn't like people getting harsh on his brand new buddy, did he? Too bad.

“Because I need him.”

Leonard scoffed. He tried to take a drink only to rediscover that the bottle was empty.

“Bones, you don't get it. I can't do this without Spock. I don't--” Jim shoved a hand through his hair, suddenly wild-eyed and-- and Leonard didn't know what. Angry. That was always a safe bet with Jim. “I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. Anything I do, he's there, and he's doing it, or he's already done it, and--”

“Fuckin' Vulcans. Do whatever they want,” Leonard muttered in agreement, having caught only the relevant parts of Jim's rant.

“--and it's like he's-- he's running the ship. Bones, she's _my_ ship,” Jim insisted, and ah, it was desperation. “I'm the captain.”

“You're _nineteen_ ,” Leonard blurted out, struck by sudden horror. “Ship full of children and Vulcans. God save us all.” They were his grandmama's words, picked up on the long-ago summer after Big Len had died that Leonard had spent around the new widow's house, loaned out by his mama to pick up the workload, keep his grandmama company and get him out of the library.

Jim's face twisted. “Fuck you, too. You don't understand what this is like. You have no idea how many times I've gotten out of bed at ass o'clock in the morning to do _something_ just because of this horrible, nagging feeling that Spock is too.”

“Then _airlock him_.”

“But I _can't_. Spock hasn't actually done anything-- except, fuck, everything I should be doing. But I never find out I should be doing this shit until he gives me, like, a status update and it's fifty items long and he got them all done. I never had to make status reports for Chris! Bones, shit, should I have? It was never like this on the _One_.”

Leonard had his eyes closed again. In the darkness behind his eyelids with the never-ending loop of _hatehatehate blood god no_ he listed the reactions of a humanoid body being forced into an absolute vacuum. “I'll do it myself f'you don't wanna. Be as easy as pie, couple'a buttons... override code...”

“I was Chris's XO for years, I _know_ how to handle a ship! Chris taught me better than this! But it's... and the _Enterprise_... I just. I can't.” Jim's oddly hollow voice broke through to Leonard, but the alcohol fog made it impossible to understand how Leonard was supposed to reply. “I can't do this, Bones. Two weeks and my captaincy's a fucking _joke_.”

The Vulcan, joking? “Ain't very funny. Fuckin' computers. Always... fuckin' around with... with...”

It wasn't the Knot, it couldn't be the Knot; he'd just downed half a bottle of whiskey and Leonard's head wasn't clear enough to keep track of Jim's rant let alone bring the Knot into focus! But there was Jocelyn's face, bloodless grey and still, one blue eye staring and the other drooped halfway shut with a smudge of blood on the lid where Leonard's thumb had tried to press it down, and he remembered it, he remembered-- he wasn't supposed to keep _seeing_ that, wasn't-- but he--

“Oh, _Bones_. C'mere. C'mon, here. Easy.”

He must've made a noise because the kid had noticed, fuck, but Leonard's throat started convulsing and a wave of dizziness swept over him, the combination of alcohol and sudden nausea pitching behind his eyes. He had to let his head fall into his hands as nausea rolled his stomach _< abdomen ripped open>_ and the whiskey threatened to make a reappearance but for the lump blocking his throat.

Shamed, Leonard tried to tell Jim, “'M a doctor, dammit, I ain't-- can't be sick at the sight of--” _Blood everywhere, so much blood, more in than out and Leonard was in it all_ \--

“It's okay. You're okay, Bones. I got you.”

“No,” Leonard moaned, choke-voiced, even as Jim muscled his chair closer to the desk so that Jim could get his hands on Leonard's shoulders and slip down into his lap, straddling Leonard's thighs. “No, no, no, no--”

But he was still curling forward against Jim, hands seeking out the kid's jacket and grabbing it tight, holding it-- that stupid kid, the last thing Leonard had left and he was forever running out and getting himself damn near killed, coming back to Leonard every time covered in blood or half beat to death, and Leonard couldn't, _wouldn't_ let him go, wouldn't let the Vulcan take Jim away from him. He had to tell Jim that, this time, had to make him see, but the words that came out instead as he buried his face against Jim's shoulder to hide the tears were, “It never goes away, Jim. It never goes away. Make him go away, God, make him--”

“I know. I got you, Bones. Let it out. It's okay, I promise.”

Like all Jim Kirk's promises, Leonard only believed it when he was drunk.


	4. Chapter 4

" _Captain, please report to the bridge for docking procedures at Central Station_."

Almost five years after Uhura had left Starfleet, the professional mannerisms and habits still remained. They were intensely familiar to Jim, and more than a little comforting. Right from the very first days that Uhura had spent on board the _Number One_ , Jim had noticed how much the new communications officer's bearing and speech patterns had resembled Pike's. There was more than a trace of Pike's confident authority in her and everything she did, whether it was buying a new pair of boots or insulting a Klingon. Jim wasn't ashamed to say that he sometimes consciously emulated that calm confidence in moments of stress.

The admission would have to be pried out of him with a pair of rusty pliers, of course-- Uhura would be insufferable if she ever found out-- but if he ever said it then he wouldn't be ashamed.

Jim had come to expect the sight of Spock's back at the science console whenever he entered the bridge, his first officer always one step ahead of him, leather jacket tight over broad shoulders and the cap of black hair shining under the bright lights. He expected to see Spock still lecturing Sulu and Uhura about the _Enterprise_ 's servers. Anticipation made him tense and snappish. The Vulcan, however, was nowhere to be seen.

"Where's Spock?" he demanded, more harshly than he intended to. Uhura shot him a glance that he ignored. Let her assume it was dissatisfaction with his first officer's absence.

"He said he had something to do in the lab," Sulu replied. "Walked out a while ago."

About to snap something about leaving the bridge during shift, Jim shut his mouth abruptly when he remembered that there had been no solid duty schedule established on the _Enterprise_ , though not for lack of trying on-- _dammit_ \-- Spock's part. Come to think of it, the words 'Chris is gonna skin him' had also been about to feature.

Tersely, Jim sat down in the command chair and said, "Has Central hailed us yet?"

"Just now, Captain," Uhura replied, one hand holding the ill-fitting Vulcan earpiece to her head. She typed out a quick message in response to something only she could hear, then said, "They've requested our registration."

Jim tensed even further. Central Station was central to nothing, really (not in the last twenty years, at least), but it was close enough to Vulcan that just showing up with the _Enterprise_ was risky. He, Scotty and Sulu had concluded that the Vulcan government was unlikely to have released a description of the ship and its capabilities for fear of their prototype technology being leaked outside of the Blockade while it might otherwise have still been recoverable, but the _Enterprise_ 's registration data had most certainly been circulated.

He nodded shortly to Uhura. At the pilot's console, Sulu hovered still and ready to jump to warp immediately if necessary. The bridge was silent as Uhura transmitted the false serial numbers and registry data that Scotty had concocted. They were fucked if anybody at Central knew the _Enterprise_ was nothing like what was coming out of Romulan engineering those days, or if Scotty's shipyard codes were not as accurate as he said they were, but the chances of such a thing happening were low enough for them to risk it.

 _Rule 24: When in doubt, lie like a motherfucker and blame it on the Romulans_.

"Registration received and confirmed. We're free to proceed to dock 32 and make berth."

The air relaxed palpably. Jim sank back into his chair in relief, but had the composure to shoot Uhura a grin sharp-edged enough to claim he'd never been worried at all. "Take us in, Sulu."

"Aye. Impulse power, making berth in fifteen minutes."

"Forwarding dock paperwork to your station, Captain."

"Can we get a map of the station's layout, Uhura?"

"Will do."

"We got a game plan?" asked Sulu.

"Yeah. One sec." Jim flicked on the shipwide comm. As officiously as he could, he drawled, "All decks, this is the captain speaking. All personnel are to meet in the main lounge area in fifteen minutes for division of the shopping lists and station duties. Dress casual but go armed, people, and for fuck's sake everybody bring a comm unit." He repeated the message in Low Orion. "Ladies and gentlemen, that will be all. Kirk out."

"Prick," Uhura said, not without affection.

" _You love me_ ," Jim replied in Orion, smirking. At the same time, he was careful to use the single (and tremendously archaic) word for 'love' that didn't imply any kind of sexual desire. Even the three words that Orion matrons generally used for the children under their care implied various degrees of affection based on the child's presumed future work or sale value. Oh, they knew love, all right... but in the Orion culture, it was usually conditional and often transactional.

In Cardassian, she retorted, " _For a given value of 'love', yes_."

" _Where the given value is infinity_?" He used another dialect of Cardassian, even going to far as to attempt the local accent.

Jim knew without being told that when Uhura curled her lip, it was at his accent. " _I was thinking of an imaginary number, actually_."

" _You mean that it's impossible to divide and thus reduce your love for me in any way? Uhura, that's so sweet_!" In Klingon the compliment actually translated to 'like the music of an enemy's dying screams', but of all the people Jim knew, Uhura would get the allusion to the Klingon love opera that Jim had drawn the line from. (And the rumour that he'd cried at the ending was a vicious, slanderous _lie_. It was just that the amount of booze it had taken to get him and Uhura through the holo had gotten them both utterly trashed, and Jim had just so happened to be at the maudlin stage of drunk by the end of it.)

At the helm, Sulu was slumped pathetically over his console. "One person who understands my physics jokes," he muttered, "just one, that's all I ask."

*

Jim felt awfully unprepared going into Central with nothing but the small pistol tucked down the side of his boot. At the last moment, he ducked down into Engineering and grabbed six heavy steel nuts out of a drawer of spare parts. They kept his fingers spread apart too far for comfort and didn't fit quite snugly enough on either of his ring fingers, but it was the best he could do for a pair of brass knuckles on the fly.

The lounge area was right across the corridor from the showers, and was the only room on the ship with carpet or upholstered furniture, even if it was all painfully ergonomic. Approaching from down the corridor, Jim was surprised to hear voices inside. Normally, any time there was a gathering that included Spock, it would be blanketed by strained, roaring silence. Was that Bones and... Scotty?

"Just because they look the same as us doesn't mean a damn thing's similar _inside_ ," Bones was saying as Jim entered the lounge. "You tried sittin' on these sorry excuses for chairs? You're better off standin'. The lumbar support's all wrong. Give you back problems 'fore you can say jumpin' Jack Robinson."

Standing in one corner of the lounge with his hands folded crisply behind his back, Spock raised an eyebrow and said, "Jumping Jack Robinson."

His intent to antagonise couldn't have been more blatant, which for a second made Jim's throat catch in outrage. He was a heartbeat away from lashing out at Spock in reflexive defence of his best friend when it caught up with him that Bones had been nothing but horrid to Spock for weeks, now. Ordinarily Jim wouldn't have thought twice about dismissing a newcomer's welfare as irrelevant compared to that of the crew who were practically family, but, out of nowhere, _something_ stopped Jim from siding with Bones as instantly as he always had. The sudden conflict of interest made him stall, mostly from complete confusion about what to _do_.

Siding with someone other than his crew, even for a second-- what the _fuck_? Spock wasn't-- Spock hadn't-- the number of years that the others had been with him for-- and the things they'd done for each other-- _Spock_ wasn't--

" _Meknah_ ," Uhura said loudly, before Jim had broken out of his private shock. "Is that what's been giving me these back aches? I haven't slept right in weeks."

"Aye, lass," agreed Scotty. "I had the same problem livin' on the spacedock. Ye'd think they'd consider a man's health and safety, even if he's in a minority, but no! T' be fair, though, this weren't meant to be a human ship."

 _Fuck this. Reboot_. Jim sliced his reeling thought processes to a stop and flung them off, immediately reconfiguring himself for the place and instant he was in with the skill of someone who had been in too many phaser fights to let his mind stutter for more than a second.

"Instant karma," his mouth said, "gotta love it." He strode into the middle of the room, slapping Bones on the shoulder as he passed. The moment of imbalance had passed, leaving Jim on mostly stable ground once again-- but he didn't look towards Spock's corner.

" _Ow_. Dammit, Jim, what the hell have you got on your fingers?"

The blast-polished nuts sparkled as Jim fluttered a wave at Bones. Looking over his crew-- _his_ crew-- he couldn't help bouncing nervously on his toes. "All right, here's the deal. Papers, please, Lieutenant."

Uhura started around to hand out the stack of PADDs under her arm.

"Those are your orders for the trip down. Supply shopping, picking up orders, sending messages-- whatever you've got, the info's there." Jim took a glance at his own PADD. "Oh, look, Uhura even highlighted the little box thingies on the map. I love connect the dots."

Bones snorted.

Despite the levity he was trying to force, Jim's throat was very dry. He couldn't help but be aware that the words coming out of his mouth were Pike's, and moreover that most of the people there _knew_ they were Pike's. "I don't want to stay any longer than six hours, understand? In and out mission, people. You get ship's business done before you do your own shit. No drinking, no drugs, no goddamn bar fights, am I clear?"

Spock was the only one who responded with, "Affirmative, Captain." In the silence it was far too loud, causing everybody to look at him, including (despite his resolution of two seconds ago, _damn_ the reflexive reaction) Jim. Though Spock's bland expression didn't so much as flicker, Jim wondered if Vulcans-- or that Vulcan in particular, to be specific-- felt the hot rush of floor-sinking embarrassment that a human would have.

"That ain't exactly casual dress," Bones sniped.

Spock was still wearing the same pilot's jacket and skin-tight leather pants that had caught Jim's eye in the bar so many days ago, clothing well suited for a club but almost impossibly unsuited for anything else. Calmly, Spock looked down at himself before replying. "It is all I have, Doctor. Purchasing additional clothing is one of the personal errands I intend to complete on this trip."

"Which brings me to a point," Jim interrupted. "Spock. What's the likelihood that your bank accounts might have been frozen or tracked by now?"

"13.7 percent, Captain." At Jim's raised brows, he continued, "On Vulcan, the process of seizing control of a legal adult's possessions-- even by a family member-- is lengthy and complicated, and requires a good deal more justification than my family could provide while hoping to keep the matter quiet. I do not believe it is a step they would take lightly." Then, without batting an eye, Spock added, "Given reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, of course, a judge could do it instantly."

"Um, fuck," Jim said, staring in disbelief. "You don't think they've got reasonable suspicion of criminal activity?"

"On you, perhaps. I do not believe there was left sufficient evidence to connect me to the theft of the _Enterprise_."

"Any evidence is sufficient, Spock." When Spock opened his mouth, Jim forestalled it with a hand. "Okay, look. How much can you withdraw without raising a flag?"

"Thirty credits at a time, up to four hundred credits in a day."

Jim saw Sulu's mouth open and then close again.

"And how much of your money is that?" he asked weakly, astounded by the astronomical limits. If the limits were proportional to the account...

"I am uncertain of exactly what percentage it would constitute."

"Guess."

"I hesitate to--"

Impatiently, Jim guessed high. "More than four thousand?"

"Affirmative."

 _Holy shit_.

"Is the limit enforced?"

"Negative. Exceeding it will send a flag to my bank branch and financial manager, however."

 _Holy_ shit _, he has a financial manager_. " _Fuck_. Withdraw it all, forget about the flag. We can't risk losing that. You have a fake ID? --No, no you don't. Sulu--"

"I've got a few clean IDs."

"Good. Until you get a fake ID of your own, Spock, your money goes into accounts under Sulu's name. Names. Split it between at least three, okay?"

"Will do."

Jim eyed Spock fiercely, daring him to protest just how fast control of his money had been taken out from under him. Spock, however, merely tipped his chin slightly to the side, sloe-black eyes flashing.

"Eminently logical, Captain," was all he said, his voice very-- maybe dangerously-- mild. "Of course I expected that joining this crew would entail making considerable personal contributions to the support and maintenance of the _ship_."

 _Fuck all if you're taking my money just for yourself_ , Jim parsed it as. Which was good enough.

"That's settled, then. Everybody got a comm? _Sidash-wa botan dii_?" he repeated, for the benefit of Gaila, who thus far had sat on a couch with her arms folded over her chest, bored by all the incomprehensible Standard. "Are they all _charged_?"

"Fuck, Jim, it was one time," Sulu snapped.

"There's a little more on the line this time than not being able to find you with me owing more money than I have to a couple angry Klingons," said Jim grimly. "We fuck up this time, we're probably dead."

"Multiple consecutive life sentences in a maximum-security Vulcan correctional facility is not death," Spock said.

Jim looked at him with hard eyes. "Speak for yourself."

*

Waiting in line for the transporter down, Jim stared at Spock. The Vulcan wasn't paying attention to Jim, concentrating instead on the transporter console as Scotty beamed down Bones and Sulu. Arms folded across his chest, Jim leaned against the wall and watched, narrow eyed, as Spock adjusted and locked in the transporter settings for Uhura and Gaila, conferring quietly all the while with Scotty. Once, Scotty reached out to correct something Spock had done. Spock listened to the explanation with his head attentively tilted, eyes fixed on the hand-waving engineer, looking for all the world as though he were utterly rapt.

"Ye dinna think your parents might be worried about ye?" asked Scotty, seemingly apropos, as Uhura and Gaila disappeared in a shimmer of blue light.

Quietly, Spock replied, "I have been a legal adult for seven years, Mr Scott, if not socially accepted as an experienced one. They may be concerned about my sudden disappearance, but they trust me."

It seemed to Jim that Spock's voice wavered just slightly over the last two words. Instantly, he knew: what Spock was thinking, what he really meant, was _trusted_. Past tense. As far as Jim knew, it was the first clue Spock had ever dropped about his life on Vulcan.

"I think ye underestimate them. Seems t' me you've got quite a family. I mean, a woman like your ma must be--"

"She is quite extraordinary," Spock said. Even the slight terseness in his voice was enough to warn Scotty off.

"Ah. Well... tha's that, then! Just the two of ye left-- hop on."

Jim strode forward to the pad before Spock could turn around and catch him staring. "Keep her warm for us Scotty," he said, taking his place on the two-man pad. Spock settled beside him a moment later, at rigid attention so as to ensure the maximum distance between them.

"Aye. On your word, Captain."

"Energise."

They rematerialised in a transporter room in the station. Mindful of universal transporter etiquette, Jim and Spock stepped down immediately and made their way to the security checkpoint at the door of the transporter room.

Any space station's importance to the main planetary system could be judged by its security. Central's was indicative of the reality that belied its name. If a ship could fool its way past a series of comm communications, a flash of an ID card-- any ID card-- was all it took to gain access to the station proper.

Spock had his thumb covering half his name as he showed his university ID briefly, but did so with a casual authority that brushed away scrutiny as unnecessary, saying, _I know very well how this works and I've got no reason to be concerned, so you don't either_. He was let to pass. No two ways about it, the guy had balls. Jim didn't pull that kind of shit with guards unless he had a good reason to even try.

The walkways and plazas of Central Station were bare metal punched together with rivets. Harsh white light glared off panels that had been given a cursory polish by industrial strength cleaners, leaving a waxy film and a crust of black grime caught in the seams. The metal corridors were punctuated by store fronts lit up by flashing holos and gas-tube signs, colourful wares spilling out of the stores on tables and racks that tried and failed to spread any kind of cheerful atmosphere beyond the confines of the store walls. For most of the shops, it was enough that they offered enough warmth in the form of music or carpet or displays to draw their customers in. In the hexagonal mezzanine one level below, someone had tried to grow sickly cactus-trees in a basin of crumbly grey soil replacement; upon failure, they had apparently settled for mummifying the remaining dessicated skeletons.

It sometimes boggled Jim's mind to think that Uhura had grown up in a place like this.

Once in the station, Spock, it seemed, had nothing to say to Jim. He displayed not a hint of the openness or interest that he had shown in Scotty. Before Jim had finished taking in his surroundings, in fact, Spock had turned on his heel and strode off down the walkway without a word. Jim was oddly off-balanced by it.

 _Fuck it_ , he thought, turning to head in the direction indicated by a couple of universal picture signs on the walls, _I didn't want him along for this, anyway. He's got his own job to do_. Jim kept his hands in his pockets to hide his impromptu brass knuckles, but his eyes stayed up and alert. He didn't trust the station or anybody on it for a moment. After all, the _Enterprise_ had safely made berth there, so what was to stop any other pirate crew from doing the same?

Two levels down, Jim finally strode into the office that the signs all over the station had been leading him towards. He paid a quarter-credit for two hours of 4-Di access and locked himself in one of the soundproof metal cubicles. It was about the size of a shower stall and smelled of stale body odour. Jim's elbows bumped the walls as he shrugged off his jacket and slung it over the back of the chair on runners in front of the comm unit.

He had work to do.

It was a job Jim could have assigned to few other people. Some of his contacts had barely accepted Jim himself as Pike's second in command; maybe half of them knew Uhura as a regular go-between. In an emergency, Sulu might have been able to beg a favour from only a handful. Slave-smuggling was a business built on trust and not faith, the difference between which was incalculable. Friends-of-friends didn't get free passes. Word of mouth entitled someone to an introduction, not assistance of any kind. Jim was about to find out which of his contacts were his, and which were still-- and only-- Pike's.

He had six messages waiting in his inbox, all asking him to confirm the rumours of Pike's capture by the Union. One demanded to know if it was true that Pike was dead. Nausea rose in Jim's throat.

 _Dark-purple Orion blood all over his hands, half-frozen fingers slapping wet and sticky at the door panel-- open open_ open _\-- Down the hall, Gaila was shrieking as she fired blast after blast at the Orion crew trying to press down the hall towards them, her wiry body jerking as it absorbed the disruptor rifle's brutal kick, and somewhere in that screaming was '_ hurry, you mould-faced little boy-child, pox rot your teeth _!' Then the door was open and Jim sprinted into a darkness full of sour sweat, blood and the stench of burned flesh. Blind and rushed, he flailed about with his flashlight, and then for one heart-stopping second the beam of his flashlight swept over something that Jim would never forget: Pike's eyes staring blown and sightless directly into Jim's, sweat-matted hair clinging to his ashen, bloodless face, and the way his broken legs were folded back at unnatural angles on the table he had been strapped to_.

Nearly. So very, very nearly.

There were thirty-seven comm frequencies on the encrypted data chip in Jim's pocket. After covering the comm unit's camera with a tissue, he plugged the chip into the wall panel, took a breath, and dialed the first.

He replied to the six people and left messages for nine more. Not being able to talk face to face with any of them made Jim edgy, but he had to accept that it was possible they really all were unavailable at the moment. He didn't like it, didn't trust it, but couldn't do a damn thing about it. He called one contact in the Free Space law enforcement patrol to see what news had been released about the _Enterprise_ 's theft from Vulcan: not much, as he and Scotty had conjectured. That, at least, was reassuring, though it didn't do much to soothe Jim's jangling nerves.

He called one woman about installing phaser banks on the _Enterprise_ (not that Jim actually _said_ as much; he wasn't stupid) and another man about the possibility of a few Klingon laser canons finding their way to some out of the way repair station in the black. He took a huge risk and put word out asking if anybody in the vicinity of Central had phasers they could spare. He begged, bribed and pleaded to the live-time forums for hull reinforcements, for shield generator parts, for _any_ kind of time in a shipyard.

The response, overall, was maddening. People wouldn't touch him, his business or his ship for all the credits in the world.

He fucking _got_ it, okay? Everybody could stop kicking him in the balls about it now. He wasn't Pike. He was vividly, painfully aware of that; there was a screaming in the back of his mind that told him so, every waking moment of the day. If people could just _stop_ grinding salt into the wound and just-- just let Jim _think_ for a second--

And all the little things-- Distracted by the thought, Jim nearly laughed out loud in something approaching hysteria as another flurry of refusals and negative replies landed in his inbox. God, the little things. If Scotty couldn't get replacement parts for the laundry system from Central's inventory, if Sulu couldn't get reading material for the ship's empty library databanks, if Uhura didn't have time to get a pair of boots without holes in the soles or Gaila couldn't find paint for the see-through shower stalls or Bones' order of medical supplies had been delayed or misplaced--

Jim hung up on the forty-third useless call, taking a savage satisfaction as the screen blinked black where the Ferengi's obnoxious face had been a moment before. Gos had no idea at all that Jim had a hand in the slave trade, just as Jim didn't know what Gos' views on slavery or even the Union were. All he knew-- and hated-- was that Gos had arms, and the bastard sold them without compunction to whoever had the credits. Jim was sure he had killed people armed with guns that they, too, had bought from Gos.

Jim wished the Ferengi would just fucking _pick a side_. Then Jim could either kill him, or wait until Gos betrayed them and kill him then, but either way, he'd have one less pitfall to watch out for. The disloyal, mercenary little shit-- didn't _give_ a damn where his weapons went or what was done with them, the scum that carried them--

Jim dug his knuckles into the bridge of his nose and growled in the back of his throat. Letting shit like that get to him...

He was cracking. Fuck, he was cracking. Fifteen days ago, he had walked into a club on Vulcan desperately needing to unwind and let _go_ of everything for just an hour, only for Spock to tear into his life like a whirlwind, bringing a rush of decisions Jim had made without thinking and opportunities he had seized without stopping to think where they would take him or what he would do there. For a while Jim had slammed off Spock hard enough to fracture a little and leak out some of the stress, but too much of it still remained, and he just...

He just--

Jim swallowed too hard, feeling the start of a hot melting burn behind his eyes.

He didn't know what to do. He wasn't sure how much longer he could handle it for.

Utterly furious with himself, Jim blinked quickly, cleared his throat with a harsh hack and forced himself to look at the clock in the corner of the wall screen. Like fuck he was giving up. He had twenty-one minutes of paid time left.

It took him a long moment to notice the green icon illuminated beside one of the names in his contact list. When Jim did, all the breath was knocked out of his lungs. He stared.

Pike was online.

"Computer, open contact with Pike, Christopher."

" _Requesting contact. Waiting for response... Waiting for response... Waiting for response_..."

Jim's nails bit into his callused palms. If Pike was right there at a comm terminal, why... why wasn't he answering? He had to know how much Jim needed to talk to him. He had to at least want to yell at Jim, didn't he? After all, the last thing Jim had done was shove Pike off the crippled _Number One_ and into the medical bay of the _Rusesabagina_ , which thank _fuck_ had answered the _One_ 's panicked distress call for a medical evacuation and been able to intercept the _One_ 's lurching trajectory from the wreckage of the Union battleship before they'd reached Free Space. Jim had even ordered Bones to sedate Pike for the transfer in order to keep him from fighting it.

He knew Pike should have been beyond furious when he'd woken up on the _Rusesabagina_ to the news that his gutted ship and its crew were millions of lightyears away. But there was a creeping, eldritch horror trying to surface in Jim's mind, drawn on by memories of Pike's crippled body and dead eyes and the things he'd _said_ , laying wrecked and exhausted in that biobed in Bones' sickbay.

( _We can't fly forever, Jim_.)

Jim felt dangerously light-headed and sick to his stomach by the weight of that one last idea on top of every other stress. Was it possible that Pike had... that what the Union had done to him... that he'd actually _broken_?

" _Waiting for-- Line open_."

Jim's throat seized up without warning. Through it, he struggled to get out, "I've been captured and someone's holding a phaser to my head."

Hoarsely, Pike said, "So have I."

The last thing that captors wanted was for their hostage to tell an accomplice what had really happened, and the first thing that anybody impersonating Jim would do to convince a doubtful ally that it was really Jim was to recite some supposedly secret fact or story. Nobody ever thought that such an alarmist phrase would be used as a password, especially in a line of work where that exact situation was a very real danger.

His eyes shut tight over the renewed hot sting of tears, Jim said unsteadily, "Hi, dad."

A sigh rushed though the speakers, low and pained. Jim tried to filter out the crackle of the signal bounced across innumerable satellites, tried to pretend Pike was close enough for Jim to feel the breath of the sigh against his cheek. Unable to stop himself, he huddled smaller into his leather jacket and buried his nose against the oily collar of it. Jim had thought of the jacket as _his_ for so long that it was jarring and horrible to find himself once again clutching the fact that it had been Pike's, once.

"Hi, Jim," Pike said, in a voice so quiet and subdued that Jim barely recognised it.

"Are you--" Jim scrubbed hard at his face, frustrated. "Fuck," he said gruffly, his tone returned to normal. "Are you okay?"

"Where are you, Jim?" asked Pike instead, his voice still too horribly empty. That should have been an _order_ , barked out in a tone Jim knew better than to ever defy.

"Everybody else is fine," Jim forced himself to say. The words came out too quickly, artificial and overbright, as though he were in a bar, rushing to cover Pike's weakness in front of a Klingon warrior looking for any cause to attack. "Jensen and Balu are dead, but you knew that already. Uh. McKenna, Lorenson, Standish and Broma all quit, the fuckers, but I guess they're alive, so there's that. Bones got that metal out of Sulu's ribcage, too; he's fine, and Uhura--"

"Jim, where are you now?"

The cold, hard lump lodged in Jim's gut grew spikes.

He reached up and pulled away the tissue covering the camera lens. While his half of the bisected screen cleared to show his own haggard face, Pike's remained empty and black. Only a tiny sliver of light filtered in where an upper corner of the card Pike had placed over the lens had started to peel away.

"Chris, uncover the camera," Jim said tensely, in a tone he had never taken with Pike. He halfway flinched, expecting to be immediately roared at for it. When he received no response at all, Jim felt a bubbling of scared rage that emerged as a far harsher order of, "Uncover the goddamn camera, Chris!"

"No," Pike whispered unsteadily.

"Take-- just take off the fucking card. Take off--"

Without warning, and in the strongest voice he had yet used, Pike snarled, "Jim, I'm in a goddamn wheelchair."

The sudden appearance of Pike's powerful self shocked Jim into instant, conditioned silence. But the returned strength vanished as quickly as it had appeared, seemingly spent, and Pike's voice trembled as he continued.

"I haven't washed or shaved myself in twenty-six days, Jim. I can't sit up in bed on my own. I have to ask for help to go down the hallway for a drink, and most days they don't even let me do that. I haven't taken a _piss_ without help in twenty-six days." Pike spit the words in a tone of such bitterness that it deepened towards loathing, making Jim cringe in his seat. "I am _never_ going to walk again, Jim. That's it, it's _over_."

"It's not--"

"Who do you think you're still kidding, Jim?" asked Pike wearily, once more lapsing into listlessness and exhaustion. "What are you trying to prove? That you outlasted me?"

"No," Jim said desperately, overwhelmed by horror, "no--"

"Well, I outlasted your father and now look where I am." The words hit Jim like a punch in the gut. Emotionally gutted, all he could do was listen in a mute daze. "One day it'll happen to you too. Don't do this, Jim. Stop. Just--" Pike's voice broke horribly-- "--stop and come home before I lose you, too."

It was so contrary to everything he knew about Pike that Jim couldn't conceive where the dull, defeated words had come from. He stared at the blackened screen, stunned.

The connection between Winona and Pike had cooled and soured during Jim's childhood-- not least because of the initial fight that had driven them apart for all those years in the first place-- and Jim had never known a version of Winona who felt anything but knife-edged grief for George. Pike, however, had been so obviously, shamelessly still in love with the man that Jim had been able to see it even at twelve years old, socially stunted and having literally never been exposed to any other people than Winona and Sam.

While Winona had raised Jim with a stubborn, uncompromising refusal to do anything more than acknowledge the hole in their lives that was the omission of everything George Kirk had touched, Pike had taught Jim everything he could about his biological father. He had talked about George like a still-living person, without mourning, proud and loyal and fiercely admiring of everything about George. Pike had made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that the way George had lived and fought was both his ideal and Jim's as well: unconditional dedication to friends and family, unflinching resistance against anything that threatened hurt them, and the unquestioning willingness to act, _act_ for what he believed was right.

Determination and daring and drive. Jim had never aspired to anything else. But while George was the name and face of the philosophy, the only living embodiment of it that Jim had ever known Pike.

 _"He understood that there are no-win situations," Pike said, his attention apparently focused on the phaser rifle his hands were deftly dissembling and cleaning. Lingering in the doorway, Jim watched Pike with fixated eyes, hungrier than he could believe for the words he was hearing from the new parent he barely knew, a man his mother had always painted as overly sensitive and lacking in necessary ruthlessness. "Denying that would be stupidity. Sometimes there_ is _no possible way to win, and that's just the world we live in. But he never let that stop him from trying to gain_ something _, even if he knew couldn't have it all. Sometimes he couldn't do anything but survive to fight another day."_

 _In one swift motion, Pike snapped the stock back together with a loud_ ka-chak _. His piercing grey-green eyes flashed up to Jim's, and, caught staring, Jim couldn't look away. "But I promise you that he always, always came back for that fight_."

"Jim," Pike said again, desperately, into the silence Jim had let drag on for too long. "Jim, tell me where you are. Come home."

"I can't do that," Jim said very softly.

Pike sounded frustrated, like he felt himself losing control. "That's an _order_."

If Jim hadn't been so numb, he would have laughed out loud at the sick mockery that the claim was. Had Pike had really been able to give him an order, he wouldn't have needed to call it one.

"You're not accomplishing anything by trying to stand up to your father's legacy, Jim. He died for it, and that's not something to be proud of. That's _dead_. Rotting and disintegrated, do you understand me? There's nothing romantic about it. It was a purposeless, senseless waste."

"I was his legacy," said Jim, barely able to keep his voice steady. There was a distant roaring in his ears.

"And I am glad he left you to me, Jim, but he's gone. Don't die for the same thing he did. Don't do that to me."

The words bounced off Jim like hailstones, the impact of them strangely dulled. He didn't know what the force was that had seized up his insides and wrapped him in a cold, impenetrable shell. All he was sure of was that the person pleading to him-- _begging_ \-- wasn't the Christopher Pike that had raised him. It was counsel that the real Pike would have been ashamed of, and that he would have been furious with Jim for listening to.

"The _Number One_ ," Jim said very clearly, "is not your ship any more. You are not her captain, and we are not your crew. From this point on, you are not involved in anything we say or do, anybody we have contact with, or any decisions we make. You no longer have any input on the future of our business, and we--" Jim's voice nearly broke completely, but he managed to choke out the final sentence. "We will not be in contact with you again."

There was dead silence.

Jim's trembling hand hovered over the 'disconnect' icon on the comm screen.

"I love you, dad," he whispered hoarsely, his voice now wavering all over the place. Jim felt his chin trembling and didn't, couldn't even try to stop it. "Take care of yourself. G-get better. Oh, god, I-- I love you. I really d-do. I love you s-suh- _so_ much. I--"

" _Jim_ \--"

The screen went black. Shaking all over, Jim sat frozen with his finger jammed against the amber 'disconnect' icon, the tip of it bright red with pressure. In the half a second before Jim had cut the call, Pike had just barely had time to rip the card away, no more than a cry of hoarse agony and a split second of bright light escaping his side of the screen.

That was that, then. The end.

Because if Jim was going to bitchslap the biggest and most powerful government in the known universe and drag all of Vulcan's power screaming down on his head, he wasn't going to put Pike in danger, too. No matter who Pike had become or how much of a stranger he was, Jim wasn't even going to risk it.

Sam had seen the real danger of Jim's career long before Jim ever had. Four years ago, Sam had finally slammed his foot down, turned, and run the hell away before Jim's actions and notoriety could get him killed by association. It was long past time that Jim took the responsibility of protecting his family on himself.

No more. No more deluding himself with vague possibilities of going back to the safety and certainty of serving as a first officer under Pike. No more going at things half-assed as though the problems were soon going to be somebody else's mess to handle. No more pretending that this ship, this crew, this colossal fuck-up of a situation wasn't _one-hundred percent_ his to deal with.

It was his. All his.

And he was going to deal with it.

Somehow.

Jim's hands were still trembling uncontrollably as he looked at the next name on his contact list and said, "Computer, open new message for Mitchell, Gary."


	5. Chapter 5

When his paid time had finally run out, Jim left the 4-Di office feeling stressed and vaguely queasy. The beginnings of a tension headache lurked at the base of his skull, aching like a day-old bruise from a Klingon's mailed fist. About the only real consolation he had was that once they had finished outfitting the _Enterprise_ for deep space and left Vulcan territory, the three-month trip into Beta Quadrant would leave Jim plenty of empty days that he could spend curled up under the covers in his bunk in the quiet and blessed dark.

And then there was Gary. Couldn't forget about that. The only other bright spot on his horizon right now.

As Jim strode past a group of quarrelling Tellarites in coveralls, he refused to let himself rub the tired ache out of his eyes. He fisted his hands in his jacket pockets, grinding together the steel nuts on his fingers.

Over the electro beats pouring out of a speaker mounted above a four-stool bar on one side of the corridor, Jim barely heard his comm chime. On the second chirp he snatched for it, fishing the clunky hand-held comm out of his pocket and raising it to his mouth. Fuck, what he wouldn't give for a new set of comms. "Kirk here."

" _Jim, it's me_ ," came Sulu's voice, audibly terse. " _We've got to leave,_ now."

 _Fuck shit fucking fuck_. Did it _ever_ end?

Feeling the tensing muscles between his shoulderblades ratchet his headache up a notch, Jim rolled his shoulders, stretching against the leather of his jacket so that it squeaked and strained. "What's the problem?"

" _There are wanted notices out for us_."

Jim's pulse spiked jaggedly. He immediately veered away from the turbolift he had been heading towards, striding instead to the nearest escalators. It lead up to the central mezzanine, about the only location on the station connected to anything by stairs. Though the mezzanine was highly public, going there was a better option than trapping himself in a tiny metal box inescapably monitored by cameras with facial recognition programs that could identify and flag him in less than a second.

" _Shit_ ," he hissed, his mind racing a hundred parsecs a minute. "Call Scotty. Tell him to get the _Enterprise_ the fuck out of here before they try to seize it. We're all wearing transponders; he can beam us up after he--"

" _Jim, there's no notice out on the ship_ ," Sulu interrupted, hurried and hushed. There was a distant clatter and rustling on his end of the line, a crackle as the comm shifted between Sulu's jaw and shoulder. Jim could just picture Sulu at work in a toilet stall, rearranging his clothing, altering his hair and eyes and facial features even as they spoke. " _If the Vulcans know we stole it, they haven't said anything_."

Keeping tight to the bannister of the wide escalator, Jim took the moving steps two at a time. He held the comm to his outside ear, using his sleeve and hand to help conceal the half of his face that other people on the escalator could see.

"Then what's the notice for?" Jim demanded, his eyes sweeping the ascending and descending escalator wells. He fully expected at any moment to see the flicker of someone pulling a phaser on him. Monetary rewards were no small motivator-- even honour-bound Romulans went for a bounty when it walked right past them.

" _Kidnapping_ ," Sulu breathed, managing even then and there to sound appropriately scornful. " _Spock's been filed as a missing person_."

A harsh, mostly humourless laugh tickled the back of Jim's throat but didn't escape. Kidnapping? _Really_? After stealing a prototype ship that probably represented thirty years of research and scientific advances, not to mentiont the cost of design and manufacturing, they were being charged with _kidnapping_?

On the mezzanine at the top of the escalators, Jim turned right around and headed back towards the side of the station he had just come from. He forced himself to slow down, though that did nothing to curb the urgency of his stride. He barely noticed the people getting the hell out of his way in response to whatever body language he was showing.

"Okay," Jim said quietly, still drycleaning through a maze of stalls set up at the mezzanine's edge. As he was forced up against the side of a booth by a crowd of people browsing the stall opposite, one of his hands flashed out for just a moment. The cheap flareglasses vanished easily into his pocket, followed a moment later by a tube of one-wash hair paint from the next stall. "That's fine. Cancel the orders to Scotty. Just tell me what happened."

" _I was at the bank just now, in a private office with one of the tellers. When I gave him Spock's account information to transfer the credits out, it pulled up a flag on his screen. The wanted notices for us aren't hugely public, but they're there_."

Jim finally reached a public fresher and ducked inside. It was empty. "Did you get the money?"

" _Fuck, Jim, of course I did. I had to pay off the teller, but he transferred out all the credits into my accounts and let me walk out quietly. I don't think I paid him enough to keep quiet if the Vulcan authorities show up for him, but he won't say anything until after we're gone_."

Jim blew out a terse breath, flicking the steel nuts off his fingers and onto the counter. "Fine. Call everybody else, tell them to drop their shit and get back to the _Enterprise_. I don't want to risk it."

" _Yessir. Jim_ \--"

One-handedly, Jim popped the top off the the tube of hair paint. Brownish-red gunk oozed out. "Yeah?"

" _I don't know for sure how widespread the wanted notices are, but if Spock buys anything with a card linked to his account, it'll definitely put up a flag on the cashier's till. Was he carrying any credits_?"

"I don't know," Jim snapped. He tried to think if he'd seen any credit chips in Spock's wallet at the club in Sdvaar. All he could remember was the university ID, that bland face of a geeky, humourless person he'd never met. "Call the others, I'll take care of Spock."

" _Yessir. Out_."

Jim snapped the comm off and back on again fast enough that he almost dropped it into the sink basin. He dialled the frequency of Spock's comm with his thumb even as he used his other hand to squeeze the hair paint out on top of his head. A cold trickle of the thin paste dripped down the back of Jim's skull, making him shudder. The last drips of the paint spattered the steel countertop when Jim tossed the empty tube down and started one-handedly scrubbing the gunk through his hair, waiting in impatient agony as Spock's comm chimed.

"Spock don't buy anything!" Jim shouted the second the line was opened. "Don't you fucking buy anything. Have you bought anything?"

Even Spock's tiny (reasonable, said some impossibly calm part of Jim's brain) hesitation drove Jim almost mad before the Vulcan replied, " _I h_ _ave not. Why_?"

"There's a flag on your bank account. Don't use a card, no matter what you do. Get back to the ship, we're leaving."

Jim had never realised just how horrendous three seconds of silence could be. But when he heard nothing from Spock's end of the line for several moments, he knew he was fucking going to _hate_ whatever Spock said next.

" _Has an alarm been raised on the station_?" asked the Vulcan, his voice neutral and too calm.

"No," Jim snarled, "no, you don't. Do _not_ fucking argue with me right now, Spock. Do not. Just go."

" _Unless security is coming for me or the_ Enterprise _this very moment, I am afraid I am unable do that, Captain_."

Jim cursed and rubbed at his hair more furiously, spattering the mirror with paint. He was going to _murder_ Spock. Being unable to stab the Vulcan in the throat that very moment, all he could do was bark, "And why the hell not, Commander?"

" _I have only just finished my portion of the ship's business. I haven't had time to get any of the personal things I require_."

"No. Leave it. Go."

" _I don't have proper clothes_ ," Spock said more stridently, dropping syllables and Jim's rank. " _I don't have a toothbrush. I_ need _these things_."

"Borrow--"

" _Nobody on the crew is my size_ ," said Spock immediately, as if he had anticipated the question. Jim cursed at him again. " _All I need is ten minutes_."

"Request _denied_ , Commander. Get back to the goddamn _ship_."

" _I suggest you make me_ ," Spock said with perfect audacity, and hung up.

Only seven years of control learned at Pike's side kept Jim from throwing his comm at the wall, where the brittle plastic likely would have shattered against the steel panels. Snarling beneath his breath, he shoved it back into his pocket and began to rough up his hair with both hands, pulling hairs as he spread the last of the paint through. With his thumbs, he smeared a streak of dark gunk over either eyebrow like war paint. The paint was already drying to a murky blackish-brown that clashed horribly with Jim's skin and eyes. It was a shit job, but good enough to pass.

Muttering a string of oaths against Spock, Jim thrust his hands beneath the sonics in the sink basin. Utterly infuriated but by no means _careless_ , Jim had the presence of mind to pull out a tiny spray bottle hooked to his belt. A fine mist of highly concentrated DNA-destroying bleach fell over the paint-spattered sink and wall, blanketing all the skin cells and stray hairs he had shed.

In their age of surgical modification and concealment, DNA was (almost) the only evidence that couldn't be faked. Courts wouldn't convict on video evidence, but under the right conditions they would pass a life sentence if investigators could come up with one misplaced skin cell (a massively difficult task, fortunately enough). Suffice it to say that criminals were careful with their genetic material.

Jim pushed the flareglasses onto his nose and stormed out of the fresher, his mood not improved when the door was slow enough in opening that he nearly ran into it. He fumbled the comm in his hand and nearly dropped it. Regaining control of the device, he hit auto-dial for the _Enterprise_ 's frequency. In the back of his mind, he noted that he was about to find out how Scotty acted in a crisis-- not the once-in-a-lifetime clusterfuck like stealing the _Enterprise_ had been, but the kind of everyday emergency common to a crew of smugglers. It would be disappointing if the engineer wasn't the type who could take the stress.

Scotty picked up so quickly that Jim knew he had to have been keeping a comm unit close to hand, something that Jim approved of. " _Aye, what is it_?"

"I need the location of Spock's transponder."

" _One second, then. Now I've just heard from the lieutenant that there's trouble on the station. Some kind of wanted notice? Do ye need a beam out, captain? 'Cause I kin do that_."

"No need to be flashy right now," Jim said, keeping his voice low and his mouth obscured behind his sleeve. "Nobody's on to us quite yet."

" _Right, then. The lad's transponder is currently... sixty-eight metres away from ye. Sixty-seven point eight metres up the corridor and five point seven metres into a store, to be exact. Looks like an all-sale of some kind_?"

Jim was already moving in the direction indicated, his strides long and sharp with anger. Still, his voice was light enough when he said, "I wasn't aware we had access to the station's blueprint database." He was reasonably sure that none of the maps publicly available were detailed enough to show individual stores. It was a bastardly marketing trick: people had to wander past or through every single store in order to find the one they were looking for.

Scotty snorted. " _We do now_ ," he said cheerfully. " _I got bored. And you're full of month-old haggis if ye think I was about to let ye all wander about down there without so much as an eye on your backs. Would ye be interested to know what would've happened if any of ye'd gone within two metres of a security post_?"

"You're fucking insane," Jim said, something like delight momentarily overcoming his primary focus on simmering rage. "I'm keeping you."

" _Like to see ya get rid of me_!" the engineer declared, his breath a little short. There was the sound of a ratchet in the background. Whatever Scotty was doing while the ship was empty, it wasn't sitting on his hands. " _I'm gettin' a call from another line here, if ye'll pardon me for a moment. Everybody's talkin' back and forth across me all of a sudden_."

"Just be ready to beam us up quick if this goes to shit," Jim ordered, and hung up. Comm shoved back in his pocket, he focused once more on his immediate problem. All the frustration that had faded into the background came rushing back, filling up his chest hot and poisonous all over again.

 _Going to kill that bastard_ , he vowed again, more than halfway certain that he actually meant it. He thought of twisting Spock's arm back into a lock and reaching around to jam his knife into the space between Spock's lean ribs-- quick, vicious, just one thrust, low and slanted upwards into the Vulcan's heart--

And from somewhere in the disorganised whirl of half-formed revenges came the thought that it would be just as appealing to get Spock's arm twisted back and then slam him down over a table so that they could fight it out the way they had last time. It was a scary, fantastic, frantically appealing idea 

If Jim ever had one more chance to be that close to Spock-- fuck, he wasn't sure if he would throw a punch or start ripping at the Vulcan's clothes, even as furious as he still was. What was scarier and made Jim want it even more desperately was that Jim didn't know what Spock would do in response: hit him, kiss him, fuck him--? He didn't know what he _wanted_ Spock to do in response. And if anything happened, where would the line be between mauling each other and having the best hatesex of their lives?

Fortunately the station was a busy, bustling place, and Jim had the common sense to bar both public sex and public murder from his list, so at least that decision had been delayed for him. All he had to do for now was get Spock back to the _Enterprise_.

Storming up the corridor that curved slightly around the station's massive disc-shaped hub, Jim kept his eyes on the storefronts that lined the walls. Groceries, art supplies, craftwares, jewellery, mechanical parts, tools, clothing-- about the only things conspicuously lacking were the sex shops, bars and weaponry stores, all of which were closely regulated according to Vulcan law and thus located on a separate level. The all-sale that Scotty had mentioned was conspicuously absent, however; all the stores Jim saw specialised in one trade or another.

But there-- four metres farther ahead than Jim had estimated--

Eyes narrowed, he slipped into the store, scanning the aisles suspiciously as he made his way towards the back. It was coldly generic, lit with plain white light from unrecessed bulbs, and seemed completely empty. The squeak of Jim's boots over slightly grimy flooring was the only sound audible aside from the saccharine canned audio playing in the background. His teeth were set on edge, one thumb tucked tensely behind the belt buckle in which his polymer knife was sheathed.

Something squealed two aisles over. Jim gritted his teeth and headed for the noise.

"I am going to kill you," he announced to Spock, who calmly raised an eyebrow and continued to flick through a rack of shirts hung on squeaking hangers.

*

"I suggest you make me," Spock retorted, before he could talk himself out of it, and hung up on Kirk. A twinge of pain shot through his chest, informing him unnecessarily that his pulse had spiked.

Arguing with Kirk-- and provoking him-- was too viciously satisfying to resist. Spock had never held with stupidity and wasn't going to make an exception for his superior officer, and it was as simple as that. Kirk's arrogance just made it that much more satisfying. How the man could be both an effective leader and such a colossal imbecile was beyond Spock's comprehension; all he knew was that it aggravated and provoked him in dangerous ways.

But there was no time to waste if the _Enterprise_ or her crew was in danger. They needed to leave as soon as possible. Spock hadn't been arguing that point, not at all. His only dispute with Kirk was the difference between 'as soon as possible' and 'immediately'. Mentally, Spock gave himself fifteen minutes to get back to the _Enterprise_ , including the time it would take him to return to the transporter room.

From the shelf he had been contemplating before Kirk's call, Spock snatched a tube of toothpaste and tossed it in the basket on his arm. He moved down the aisle far more quickly than he had before, allowing himself only moments to glance over each set of products before choosing. Soap, deodorant and a skin file followed in quick succession; he hesitated over washclothes only a moment before grabbing, impulsively, a red set of hand towels embroidered with the same kind of flowering succulents that his mother grew in her rock garden.

Being situated well within the range of casual traffic from _w'l'qn_ , the store stocked _w'l'qn_ -specific merchandise as a matter of routine. Spock had learned aboard the _Luther King_ just how difficult it became to find products for _w'l'qni_ outside of Free Space. One aisle over, Spock was relieved to find an antifungal cream stocked with other generic medications. The _Enterprise_ 's sickbay, though supposedly prepared for all eventualities, had not been stocked in anticipation of a non- _w'l'qn_ crew that would alter the ship's atmospheric controls to obscenely humid levels. Spock hadn't contracted any kind of skin lesions yet, but _w'l'qn_ skin, though tough under desert conditions, was notoriously sensitive to water. But a medicated cream was enough to stand between Spock and gangrenous toes or genital infection-- an easy solution for an obvious problem that had simply never occurred to the Vulcan Science Acadamy.

Socks and underwear came from an unapologetic metal bin in a back corner. As dismayed as Spock was by the poor-quality merchandise available, he had no choice but to take his selection quickly. The only gloves he could find were of Oolo design and had an extra finger, but he reminded himself that it was a simple task to remove the extra digit and sew the hole closed.

On that thought, Spock hurried back across the store and threw a small mending kit into his rapidly filling basket. Against the sudden clamour of added pressure filling his head, it was a struggle to keep his mental shopping list organised. Briefly, he was distracted. What was _wrong_ with him, that he was having difficulty remembering a simple list? He had been able to recall the procedure for a manual cold start under the threat of arrest and attack by security ships, so _why_ couldn't he--

Noticing the clerk watching him curiously as he passed her desk, Spock was careful not to catch her gaze. A brief burst of adrenaline tried to bring up his heart rate, to the result of sharp pains that released yet more stress hormones. Spock swallowed back the metallic tang in his throat and breathed deeply, trying to bring his pulse back down.

Back on the other wall of the shop, he began to quickly search through what few racks of clothing the all-sale had. 3.578 minutes had already elapsed. If he ran, Spock calculated that he could reach Central's transporter rooms in 7.144 minutes, meaning that slightly less than half of his remaining time to locate and purchase his necessities had already elapsed.

A shirt, blue, that Spock estimated was approximately his size-- another two, with longer sleeves that would only come down to the middle of his forearms--

Rage broke over Spock like a wave of acid, eating holes into his mental barriers before he regained the presence of mind to block awareness of his psi points and draw his shields in tight again. Not needing to look up when he could feel Kirk's mind like the epicentre of a jagged psionic earthquake, unfiltered mental energy emanating from him in shockwaves, Spock kept his eyes on the rack of clothing and forced his breathing steady. Kirk was _angry_.

Spock could deal with that. So was he.

He heard Kirk inhale moments before the human growled, "I am going to kill you." Spock had to note with detachment that Kirk's most threatening tone couldn't match the harshness that _w'l'qn_ vocal cords were capable of.

Against the splintery pain of his jumping heart, Spock manged to keep his face cool as he glanced at Kirk. He was momentarily thrown by the fact that Kirk's brassy hair was now a dark, murky brown, but didn't stop shuffling through the shirts, unwilling to lose even a single second of what little time remained to him. "I very much doubt that," he said neutrally, and tossed a fourth shirt over his now-full basket.

Deciding abruptly that four was more than enough, he turned towards a rack of pants. Exactly as Spock had anticipated-- not so much by feeling the impulse telegraphed through Kirk's psi waves as by simply _understanding_ Kirk the way Spock was beginning to-- Kirk's hand lashed out and caught Spock's wrist in a steely grip, jerking him to a halt. Cool-eyed even against the danger of Kirk's fingers so close to his bare skin, Spock levelled a look at Kirk.

"This will take me no more than 3.8 minutes," Spock said very quietly, holding Kirk's glare with his own. Kirk's upper lip twitched and his nails dug into his wrist through Spock's jacket, forcing Spock to bite back a sharp remonstration about damaging the valuable leather. "I think you will find," he continued far more dangerously, "that it will take you far longer to get me back to the ship if you try to force me there."

The muscles of Kirk's face worked silently for a moment, fury warring with outrage. Finally, Kirk seemed to shudder through his entire body and relaxed with what looked like a force of will, though his eyes still burned like mercury-argon lasers. In the subsequent release of his own tension, Spock was able to marvel yet again at the human's ability to simply _release_ emotion in a way that no _w'l'qn_ could. It didn't matter how angry Kirk was with him, or vice versa; he _had_ to get Kirk to teach him whatever technique he was using.

"I am _this_ close to shooting you here and now," Kirk said in a voice of muted fury, but released Spock's arm and let him move over to the pants. He shoved his hands in his pockets and seethed on the other side of the rack as Spock searched for his size, radiating barely leashed impatience.

Spock said nothing, uncertain that he would be able to stop himself from antagonising Kirk out of his momentary calm. There were a dozen remarks ready on his tongue, none of them helpful or even neutral. Feeling pressed to be done, he grabbed two pairs of pants from the rack, both black and rated for Andorian body temperatures, which would cover _w'l'qn_ physiology as well. Without doing anything more than roughly estimating their dimensions, Spock headed abruptly for the till. Kirk stalked several steps behind him, his presence prickling at Spock's senses.

As he approached the cashier's desk, in the back of his mind he recalled Kirk's warning about his bank cards. He was carrying enough credits to pay for the things he had selected, but the real problem was that, contrary what the _Enterprise_ 's entire crew had concluded, wanted notices had been put out for them.

It was an intelligent choice on the _w'l'qn_ goverment's part, and Spock felt foolish for having not anticipated it. In failing to make the notices public, they had kept information from not only the public but the _Enterprise_ 's crew as well. The crew knew now that some officials and institutions had their records flagged, but they had no way of knowing who _w'l'qn_ had contacted or how widespread the flags were. The sense of security that had brought them to Central was gone.

Spock laid his purchases down next to the till while casually not meeting the cashier's eyes, faking absent interest in a display beside the register. His hands, however, moved to tug down the hem of his shirt in a gesture of stress he had never grown out of.

The cashier was still trying to make eye contact. "Did you find everything you were looking for?" she asked, scanning Spock's purchases through. Spock made a noncommittal noise, still not looking directly at the bright silver girl. Behind him, Kirk shifted impatiently.

"Scan here," the cashier said, holding out a credit scanner. She was definitely squinting at Spock. His body started to tense.

The computer gave an unexpectedly loud beep, startling both Kirk, who inhaled sharply, and Spock, who felt his skin flinch. Mind racing, he had a horrible moment to think that computer had somehow brought up an alert against his anonymous credit chip. The cashier took back the scanner without a word, however, and Spock realised that the register's response had been normal after all.

The girl, however, had given up all pretense of not staring, the ultraviolet-sensitive surfaces of her glistening black eyes mirroring back Spock's reflection as she peered at him. Adrenaline rushing cold beneath his skin, Spock saw the fatal progression of recognisation, shock and alarm across the cashier's face in slow motion.

Her mouth opened. Kirk's psi waves flared.

In a burst of fluid motion, Spock lashed out and sank his fingers into the nerve bundle at the base of the girl's shoulder even as he was lunging across the counter, one hand flat on the counter to boost himself over it. He slid across the metal surface in time to throw an arm around the girl and catch her collapsing body, suddenly no more than a limp weight. Half a second delayed, pain burst through his chest, leaving Spock gasping as he lowered the cashier to the floor.

All Kirk had had time to do was utter, " _Fuck_." He stood with one hand was at his belt, his knife only halfway drawn, eyes very wide.

Spock experienced a moment of ludicrous, unreasonable pleasure at having astounded Kirk so, which shocked him in and of itself. There was no time to react to it, however, as Kirk recovered and broke into action. Faster than Spock would have expected, Kirk vaulted onto the countertop, stretching back to reach the register's touchscreen and beginning to tap at it.

"She recognised us for sure?" he asked, blunt fingertips flying over the keys.

"Yes."

Kirk muttered a curse, but his face was suddenly alight with very different expressions-- intensity, determination, and slightly crazed focus on the register. It was the unmistakeable look of his mind whirling at breakneck speeds. He pulled a data solid from one of the various slots on his belt that Spock had never asked about and plugged it directly into the register.

"What are you doing?" was all Spock could ask, suddenly seeing the entire situation spiral out of control in front of him.

"First rule," Kirk said shortly, as the register's screen flickered, failed, and then exploded in a furious outpouring of raw code. His eyes were bright and he was breathing faster. "May as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb."

Spock jerked the hem of his shirt down, feeling more taken aback than he had been since the first time Robau had asked him to hack a security feed. He didn't let himself say what first came into his head, an expression of shock over Kirk's inclination to casual theft that even Spock recognised as naive. After all, had Kirk hesitated for a moment when Spock had proposed stealing the _Enterprise_?

"You believe you can break the encryption on the register before security arrives?" he asked, tension driving his voice somewhat thinner than he meant to allow.

"She didn't hit the panic button," Kirk muttered feverishly, his hands hovering over the touchscreen in twitchy anticipation. "Just let the program do its work."

Spock stepped over the cashier's unconscious form and slid lithely back over the counter. He brushed close to Kirk's side for only a moment, but it was enough to leave him breathless when he landed. Kirk's legs jerked as though he, too, had felt the static jolt.

"If you want anything else, grab it now," Kirk said tersely. "Forty seconds."

"I cannot help but think that if you intend to hack registers with that program at all, it should be faster," Spock muttered. He was trying to focus, but his pulse had increased by almost 12.1%-- or was it 11.7%? He couldn't concentrate on even the most basic of body rhythms, not with the sharp pangs of agony piercing his chest. Every breath, every heartbeat made him increasingly more nauseous.

Blinking the faint grey patches out of his vision, Spock cast his gaze around the store-- and found a young Bolian man staring back at him. It took only one look at the man's wide-eyed shock to realise he had seen and understood exactly what was happening.

Kirk noticed the Bolian a fraction of a second after Spock had, alerted by movement in his peripheral. He, like the Bolian, froze-- and perhaps it was only the reflex of an instant, but it was time enough for Spock to act.

Acting on pure impulse, Spock snatched a small, cylindrical device from Kirk's belt and pointed it at the Bolian, his arm rock steady. The young man blanched as he looked down at the red dot shivering on his chest.

"Put down your comm and get on the floor," Spock ordered. Over the swoop of nausea in his ears, he could barely hear the words rapped out in his own commanding voice. Gray lights popped before his eyes. "This is not your money and not your concern. Nobody has been hurt yet."

Slowly, the Bolian did as Spock said, getting down on his knees and stretching out a shaky arm to place his comm on the grungy metal tiles. Somehow, Spock kept the dot of light focused as the man lay down and hid his face beneath his arms. It took every scrap of his self control to fight back a jitter that might have given the Bolian courage to rush at him.

At the register, Kirk jammed Spock's credit chip beneath the scanner and hit several buttons. "And we're out," he said shortly, snatching back the chip and leaping from the counter.

Careful not to get in Spock's line of fire, Kirk grabbed the Bolian's comm from the floor and backed away with it in hand. "Stay down on the floor and don't move a muscle until somebody else finds you, understand me?" he barked, as he and Spock retreated towards the front of the store.

Reassured by the man's face-down flinch, Spock snapped the device off, grabbed his bag of purchases and followed hard on Kirk's heels. He didn't know what kept him on his feet, only that his vision had tunnelled dangerously.

As if to punctuate the entire episode, Kirk swept a knitted purple cap from a random shelf and jammed it onto Spock's head, over his ears, the motion so swift that Spock had no time to react to the fact that Kirk's _fingers_ had come so close to his ears. All he caught was a flash of Kirk's eyes, glittering in a face too flushed and bright to be as calm as he was pretending.

Doing his best to breathe evenly and match Kirk's stride, Spock followed. Without any further delay or discussion, they headed directly for the station's transporter rooms.

The entire thing had taken barely more than a minute-- though exactly how much more, Spock was too pain-nauseous to say. Rattled and still buzzed with adrenaline, Spock felt hyperexposed in the thronging corridor, as though every being that passed them would know exactly what they had just done, though he knew for a fact that the store had been too deep and crowded for anybody to see the back of it from the entrance. The illogic of guilt, however, was intractable.

Two levels down, Kirk finally looked over at Spock, his eyes shadowed beneath lowered lashes. The stimulation of the theft had settled to a dark flush in his face and a damp gleam of sweat beneath his jaw, recalling images of another type of aftermath altogether. In a low, cutting voice, he asked, "Spock, you do know that was a laser pointer, don't you?"

"I did," Spock replied tersely, through pain that had dulled to a constant throb, and passed the device back to Kirk without brushing his fingers. "But he didn't."


End file.
